


Time is a Broken Sandglass

by ancientroots



Series: A Closed World [1]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Selectively Mute Red (Pokemon), Suicidal Thoughts (past)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:06:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29263248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientroots/pseuds/ancientroots
Summary: At fourteen, Red comes down the mountain.It's the first time he and Green have seen each other in three years.It's been even longer since they were friends.
Relationships: Ookido Green | Blue Oak & Red, Ookido Green | Blue Oak/Red
Series: A Closed World [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2148951
Comments: 7
Kudos: 48





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> In many ways, this is inspired by reading a number of great Pokemon over the years: Cryptographic_Delurk's Missed Signals, Lost Lines, clefairytea's Peaks and Valleys, and Skylark's Halycon are old favourites.

Chapter One

People broke promises. This was something Red had known from childhood. His father had left. Green had started hating him. Red himself had abandoned the championship to climb a mountain, and stay there for three years.

People disappointed. They were disappointed.

This was a fact of life.

At fourteen, he came down the mountain and went to Viridian City Gym.

Green met him at the door, an Eevee he hadn’t had three years ago playing around his feet. When he looked at Red, it was with a composure far removed from the eleven-year-old child he’d been at the Indigo Plateau. Then, even through the bluster, the arrogance, and the condescension, Red had always sensed a brittleness waiting. His childhood friend, hiding behind the face of someone he no longer recognised.

“Lance told me that he’d sent someone up to challenge you,” Green said. “Someone with a good chance of getting you off that damn mountain, from what he described. Someone a lot like you.” He raised an eyebrow. “Not that I thought there was much of a resemblance. Ethan was much chattier, for one thing.”

Green was chatty, too. Always said more than he needed to say, and half of it meaningless anyway.

“Your Pokemon at the Pokemon Centre?”

Red nodded.

“Well, you should be in a hospital yourself, if you ask me,” Green said. “Good thing I had the fore-knowledge to close the Gym today, right?” He whistled, and Eevee bounded up onto his shoulder. She blinked bright, brown eyes at Red, and tilted her head. Fluffy ears twitched; her coat gleamed silky smooth in the sun.

Red reached out a hand.

Green caught his wrist, face dark.

They were both fourteen. Taller and lankier than they’d been. Their wrists as skinny as the rest of them.

But Green’s hand, Red registered, was strong. The fingers slender, deft, just like when they were children and their fourth-grade teacher suggested they both take piano lessons. Something to take their minds off Pokemon, she’d said. Something to remind them the world was bigger than battling, and training, and mastery.

In comparison, Red’s hand was stringy, nearly skeletal. The skin was reddened and rough with cold and hard living, and his fingernails were bitten to the quick.

Green sucked in a deep breath. Suddenly, he looked a lot older than fourteen. The shadow passing over his face, something not unlike the determined cheer in Red’s mother’s voice, in the messages she’d continued to leave on his PokeGear over the years. 

“Let’s go,” his friend said, abruptly.

(Were they still friends? It was a question Red had never let himself examine too closely.)

A Pokeball launched into the air. Arcanine prowled its way around one of the tall, vine-wrapped pillars lining the way to the gym.

Green didn’t let go of Red’s fingers, only nudged him toward the Pokemon. “Get on. We’re going to the hospital.”

Red had made it down the mountain, to the Pokemon Centre, and all the way here just fine. It wasn’t like he was ill. He had a minor headache, but that was normal. He was tired, but that was also normal. He was cold, which was a little strange at the tail-end of the summer. And when he’d dropped off his Pokemon, the nurse had tried to hold him back, concern bright in the cadence of her voice.

But as kindly as she’d spoken, as gently as she’d taken his Pokeballs from him, Red couldn’t bring himself to speak to her. To even look at her.

Everything in the Pokemon Centre had been too bright. Too loud. The walk between the Centre and the Gym had been little better.

The hospital would mean more lights. More noise. More people like the well-meaning Pokemon Centre nurse who had asked him question after question, expecting him to answer.

“Your face is doing that thing,” Green said, sharply. “Look, I’ll do the talking, all right? Or if you don’t want me to do that, you can sign. You can nod and shake your head.”

Red hadn’t signed in years.

“I’ll do the talking,” Green repeated. “Please, you need to –” His jaw clenched. “Red.”

It’d been a long time since Green said ‘please’ about anything. The last time, it’d been the year after Green’s parents died, and Professor Oak had come to Red’s house. Sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. Before his mother had even looked at him, Red was already gone. Out the kitchen door and across the street. Up the stairs into his best friend’s room.

Knees drawn up to his chest, stuffed Raichu clutched in his arms, Green hadn’t looked up when Red sat down beside him.

Red touched his arm.

_It’s been ten months,_ his friend said, slowly. _They never left us with Gramps for longer than eight, before._ He seemed to curl into himself. _Please don’t talk._

People made promises only to break them. Red, at ten years old, had made no promises. He’d only sat there, on his friend’s narrow, Magikarp-patterned bedspread, and said nothing while Green cried noisy, wordless tears.

Arcanine nosed at Red’s arm. Then barked excitedly, as if it recognised his scent.

Red sank his stiff, painful fingers into its soft fur. _Okay_ , he didn’t say. The words wouldn’t form in his mouth. The sign stuttered, alien after so long.

But words were unnecessary. All he needed to do was act.

That Red didn’t speak was something Green had accepted as fact, natural, part of how the world had worked since they met. As a matter of fact, it was more inarguable than when, exactly, they’d met. Daisy liked to say they’d known each other since birth, but that wasn’t possible, because Green had been born when his parents were travelling through Kalos. Gramps didn’t remember.

Delia, Red’s mom, probably had it right. She said that they’d met when they were four years old, when Green’s parents had decided he was old enough to be left together with Daisy at Gramps’ while they travelled. Delia and Green’s dad had been close friends as children. It’d only been natural that Red and Green, the same age, neighbours, and Pokemon-obsessed, followed in their footsteps.

Red didn’t speak. It wasn’t because he couldn’t. Green knew, because his friend spoke to _him_ just fine.

Red didn’t speak to other people. That was fine; maybe he didn’t want to. At least, that’d been how four-year-old Green interpreted the situation.

As the kid who’d had a Kalosian accent for six months, whose grandpa was the Pokemon professor, and who was dropped off at said grandpa’s place for months at a time – Green knew what it was like to be different.

He’d defended Red, and his friendship with Red, with a ferocity that frequently got them both into trouble.

Until Mom and Dad went to far-off Unova, and didn’t come back. Green, nine, and Daisy, fifteen, were left at Gramps’ permanently. A man who liked his research better than children who needed to be fed, and watered, and sent to school and given attention. A man who couldn’t remember Green’s fucking _name_.

At first, Green waited. He hid on the day of the funeral, so that not even his sister could find him. He ignored the adults who tried to be kind, and punched the kids who taunted him for being an orphan.

And when, after ten months, Mom and Dad stayed gone, it was only then that his pathetic attempts to paper over the cracks of his world went up in flames. The world burned; Green burned with it. And so did his friendship with Red. Because when he was on fire, Green was the kind of shitty, desperate person who went around trying to set everyone else on fire too.

_You were ten,_ his sister had said, when he told her all this one day, two years after Red disappeared. They’d been having tea in the garden behind the house. At half three in the afternoon, Gramps was busy in the laboratory, and Daisy’s line of customers was thinning. She handed them over to her assistant, a sixteen-year-old boy from Johto.

_Eleven, when Red won the Championship,_ Green corrected. _Won the Championship, brought down Team Rocket, and caught Mewtwo._ He picked up his mug of green tea. _And what did I do? Taunted my best friend from Pallet all the way to the Indigo League._

_Green._

_Ignored the suspicious-looking grunts all over Celadon City._

_They were the League’s responsibility!_

_Held onto the Championship for –_ he tilted his head. _Twenty-six minutes? Less?_

She stared at him, jaw tight. _And what else? Are you going to blame yourself for Red disappearing too? You weren’t even here._

He sipped at the green tea. It was too cool to burn his tongue.

He set the mug down.

_Oh, Green,_ she said.

Nine, and his parents were dead in some distant land.

Ten, and he ignored Red in school, watched with cold eyes as their classmates goaded him.

Eleven, and he sped through his Pokemon journey, faster and faster and faster, as if the speed, as if each subsequent victory and poison-barb thrown in his ex-best friend’s direction – as if all of that would silence the noise in his head.

Twelve, and he was humiliated. He took ship to the Sevii Islands, devoted his every waking hour to catching Pokemon to fill his Pokedex, and pretended there was nothing else in the world. Until one day, he made it to the Pokemon Network Center on One Island, and Celio was waiting for him with a message from Bill. _Green,_ the message said, in Gramps’ typically terse manner. _Red is missing._

Thirteen, and Lance offered him the Viridian City Gym. Lance had taken back his position in the Champion’s Room. Had spent the past year and a half cleaning up both Red’s mess, and the remaining Rocket cells. When Green, who didn’t like him, couldn’t like him – after all, he’d always been sure that Lance didn’t like _him_ , and now he’d let Red run off to who-knew-where – asked, aggressively, confrontationally, why he hadn’t gotten rid of Team Rocket himself in the first place, the Acting Champion only shook his head. And said: _He’s on Mount Silver. He wanted you to know._

Fourteen, and Green handed an Earth Badge to a trainer who, chatter aside, reminded him of someone he hadn’t seen for a long time. Ethan waved good-bye on his way to the Pokemon League, and Green called Lance.

Lance said: _I’ll let you know._

Two weeks after that, and Red came to his door. Half-dead, wordless, alone.

Green put his ex-best-friend on Arcanine, and took him to Viridian City Hospital. Once they were there, he spoke for Red. It was like exercising an old, little-used muscle. Sometimes, the motions were stiff. Unnatural. Almost painful. Made more difficult by the fact that Red wouldn’t speak to him either. Wouldn't even sign.

Green wondered why it surprised him. They hadn’t been friends for a long time.

But he could still do it. Interpret from Red’s expression, or his posture, if he was particularly uncomfortable. If he was confused. If something hurt, or didn’t hurt. As for straightforward answers like yes, no, and maybe, they were easy enough if Green got him to pinch him once, twice, or three times for each possible answer.

“Has his anxiety always been this severe?” asked the counsellor who visited Red’s room after the physical scans and tests were all done.

“He can usually gesture,” Green said, shortly. He’d never liked talking to adults about Red’s situation. Even doctors. Sometimes especially doctors. “Nod, shake his head, point and whatever. And when he’s comfortable, he can sign.”

The counsellor’s fingers flickered quickly.

Red’s hands, chafed, stick-thin, and stiff with tension since they entered the hospital, curled hard into the sheet.

“He’s not comfortable,” Green snapped.

After a few more questions, the counsellor left.

Another hour, and Delia arrived.

She folded her son into her arms. Whispered to him. Red turned his head into her neck, said something equally quiet back.

Green said, stiffly: “I’ll head to the Pokemon Centre.”

“Thank you,” Delia said.

“He came down on his own. I didn’t do anything.”

Before she could argue, or worse, thank him again, Green made his escape.

On the way out, he saw Gramps and Daisy conferring with one of Red’s doctors. He lifted a hand at them, and speed-walked in the opposite direction.

He already knew what the doctor had to say. There were new things like: _malnourished_ , _hypoglycaemic_ , _poorly-healed injuries_ ; and old things like: _stress, depression, anxiety disorder._ There were questions no-one could answer.

At the Pokemon Centre, Pikachu sparked at him unhappily. The other five Pokeballs were like lead weights in his hand.

Before heading back to the hospital, he dropped by the Gym to pick up Eevee. Pikachu could do with the distraction. No point in perfectly good hospital equipment getting electrocuted just because one scrawny yellow rat didn’t like the way the doctors looked at his trainer.

After a moment of hesitation, Machamp’s Pokeball went onto Green’s belt too. Machamp, despite her size and strength, was the single one of his active Pokemon team besides Eevee who could be trusted to be careful around an injured human. And Red, who’d probably only fantasised about having one, would be fascinated by her.

Most people, after all, needed to speak to someone before they’d agree to trade them their prized Machoke.

He sat at Red’s bedside. Machamp used two of its four hands to shake both of Red’s. Eevee allowed herself to be patted, then scratched behind the ear, before wandering away to sniff interestedly at Pikachu.

Pikachu slapped her on the nose.

Both Pokemon bristled.

Red reached into his backpack, a faded, patched thing, and withdrew a squishy, blue-and-yellow ball. With a flick of his wrist, the ball flew in Pikachu’s direction.

A glare of death at the inanimate object, and then Pikachu twitched its tail in resignation. He turned to Eevee. “Pika-pika chu.”

Eevee’s ears fluffed. “Vui.”

Green tore his gaze away. They’d play just fine with each other. “Your other Pokemon healed well,” he told Red. “The Centre will email more detailed reports later, but the worst any of them suffered was a couple of half-healed scratches here and there, and I expect those came from the battle with Ethan.”

Machamp wandered away to play cards with Mr. Mime.

Green’s eyes drifted to the flowers on the bedside table.

There was a tap on his arm.

“What?”

A pinched expression.

“Look,” Green said. “I may have done great with your pokers and prodders earlier. But there are some things that just don’t compute.”

Machamp came back with a note-pad and pen. Mr. Mime waved.

Red tore off the first page, already scrawled over in terrible handwriting. (Neither Red nor Delia bothered with pretty, or legible.) He wrote: _Ethan._

“What do you want to know?”

Red’s pen didn’t move.

Green was fourteen, not eleven. He was a Gym Leader, responsible for all the Pokemon-related matters of a good-sized city. He swallowed his irritation. “Ethan is fine. Made it down with his Pokemon two hours after you did. If you’re asking about the Championship, well, sorry to break it to you, but he was inducted into the Hall of Fame before he even climbed that blasted mountain.”

His skin itched, the way it’d been doing since the immediate urgency of everything had gone. Taking Red to the hospital, calling Red’s mom, interpreting Red’s silence to doctors and counsellors, and picking up Red’s Pokemon – once all that was done, what the hell was he still doing here?

It wasn’t like Red needed him. He’d survived three years on the highest mountain in two regions.

“Lance is Acting Champion, remember? The Championship’s got nothing to do with you anymore. The official induction ceremony, the one with the media circus, I’m sure you remember, still has to happen though. Maybe in a week. You’ll probably be invited.”

And then Green wished he’d bitten his tongue. Red hadn’t stuck around long enough for his own official ceremony. Neither had Green. There was nothing to remember.

Red’s bone-thin fingers flexed around his pen.

Green’s jaw clenched.

Another word scratched out onto the page. _Media._

“They won’t get inside the hospital,” Green said, without inflection. “And when your mom takes you back to Pallet, Gramps and Daisy will make sure they don’t get at you there either.”

The pen nib pressed deep into the ‘a’ in ‘media’.

“You _are_ going back, right?”

Pikachu’s little ball game with Eevee had somehow ended up with them knocking their heads together.

“Where else would you go?” Green could hear the sudden tautness of his voice. “If you’re going up another mountain –”

Red paused. Then began to write slowly, laboriously. His dark hair had been longish, but not too long, when Green saw him earlier. As if, in the three years he’d spent on Mount Silver, Venusaur had been persuaded to serve as barber. Now, though, it was newly washed and cut, probably by Delia or a nurse while Green was gone, and the combination somehow made Red look younger. Thinner. His face, sun-dark and gaunt, framed by dark hair as soft and fine as it’d been when he and Green were children.

_You look like a girl,_ the village children had liked to taunt Red. _Your hair is so pretty._ And then they’d turn around and accuse Green of exactly the same thing, for different reasons. Apparently having thin, long fingers was girly. Wearing a pendant, even one that’d been a gift from his father, was girly.

_I’m a girl,_ Daisy had said, when Green came crying to her, fists bleeding and furious because Red had, like he always did, just stood there and taken it. At least until they insulted Green, and then Red had jumped the bullies, and Green had followed him, and now they were both in trouble with the headmistress. _Is it so bad to be called one? Next time, find a better reason to hit them, okay? Tell Red the same thing._

Sometimes, Green thought about the world, and all the reasons it gave him to be angry, and he would understand why his parents had spent his and Daisy’s childhoods travelling. If there was no good place, and few good people, maybe it was better to just keep moving, one good person at your side. Better, in that way, to stick with what you knew, and what you couldn’t know for long enough that it became important.

“Red,” Green said, and did not think of the pendant, the gift from his father, that he still wore around his neck. “If you go up Mount Silver again, I will drag you down myself.”

Eevee wound her way around Green’s ankle, flicked her ears in that way she always did when Green was distressed.

He wasn’t distressed.

Red finished writing, and took his arm off the sheet. He looked up at Green.

Green read the ill-formed words. _Why didn’t you come?_

Come? Come where?

And then, Green understood. Lance had told him that Red was on Mount Silver. Him, and maybe only one other person. One of them, Red’s mom, couldn’t have gone up a mountain populated with the kind of high-levelled wild Pokemon that Mount Silver would have.

One of them just hadn’t wanted to.

_Why didn't you come?_ Green could fill in the blanks.

There were multiple possible answers. _Did you want me to?_ Neutral enough, maybe even a conversation-opener: what did you need me to do? What do you want me to do now?

Or if not that, then something like: _When your own mother couldn’t?_ Because that would have pointed out the appalling lack of filial piety Red had demonstrated by disappearing up the mountain in the first place. 

At the very least, Green could have just told him the truth.

_I wanted to a hundred times. I couldn’t._

Instead, what came out of Green’s mouth was sharp, accusatory, and not helpful at all. “Why didn’t I climb a mountain to see you? Well, why did you stay up there for three fucking years in the first place?”

When the hospital discharged him, Green appeared to take Red home.

Red was surprised.

Over the past three weeks, Green had sometimes sent Eevee or one of his other Pokemon with Daisy on her daily visits. He’d never come himself.

“I’m sorry,” his sister had apologised the first week, as she ran a careful hand through Red’s hair. There was a frown on her face, probably at the functional, but not particularly neat cut Mom had given him. “With the formal induction ceremony for the new Champion and everything, Green’s been a bit busy with League stuff. He’ll be by someday soon.”

Red had let her take a pair of scissors to his hair shortly after. He didn’t like people touching him, with the exception of his mother. Still, Daisy had deft, quick hands. And she made no sudden movements. Chattered as she worked; a quiet stream of easy, warm chatter that flowed like a foreign language into one ear and out the other. She expected no answer.

Since Mom had come, on the heels of Green’s message the day Red came down the mountain, Red had been forced to practise his rusty sign language. He didn’t want to speak to his mother in the hospital, not when nurses and doctors and the steady stream of visitors could hear them. He liked Misty and Brock. Lance was okay too. Red had enjoyed his visit more than he’d thought he would. Mostly because the older man had brought his Dragonite and seemed content to just sit on the hospital rooftop while their Pokemon flew lazy circles above them.

Still, he couldn’t speak to them. And he couldn’t stand the idea that they, or the hospital staff, might hear him speak. 

Even just to his mother, Red’s words felt dusty, disused. Somehow dangerous. As if he were opening himself to an attack he wouldn’t be able to turn aside.

Sign language was slow, hesitant. But he had managed to use it with Mom all right the past couple of days.

Daisy would probably remember.

He signed to her, as she set her scissors down: _Thank you._

Green’s sister was like Green in a lot of ways. Red didn’t think he’d ever seen her cry. (He’d seen Green cry.)

She took Red’s hand. “I’m glad you came home.”

On the last day, it wasn’t Daisy who came. Or Red’s mom. It was Green, Eevee on his shoulder, and a handful of Berries for Pikachu.

“Eevee insisted,” he shrugged, as he held his open palm out to Pikachu. “I think she likes the little yellow terror. Can’t imagine why.”

Pikachu sparked a little, then grudgingly snaffled the berries.

“Come on,” Green said. “Your mom is waiting.”

They took Pidgeot.

As the bird Pokemon soared above Viridian Forest, Red looked down into the sunlit canopy of close, dark trees. It had, he remembered, once seemed mysterious and impassable; an unknowable rite of passage. The mystery was gone, now. There was only memory, fading at the edges, crumpled with the knowledge of what came after.

He tightened his grip around Green’s waist.

His friend shouted: “You okay?”

Red couldn’t answer.

The hospital counsellor had come back one more time in the two weeks Red had spent in the hospital. Green hadn’t been there, but Mom had been, and she had interpreted for Red. The counsellor would ask questions; Red would write his answers down on a note-pad, and Mom would read aloud the messy scrawl.

_There is speech therapy,_ the counsellor had said.

_It’s an anxiety disorder,_ Mom had said, before Red could answer. _Not a problem with his speech. He can speak fine._

_Then perhaps therapy for anxiety._

Red had shaken his head.

_His records show that he saw a therapist from ages four to six, and that he progressed from speaking only to his mother to speaking to neighbours and close friends. What retarded his progress?_

_Please don’t use that word_ , Mom had answered, sharply.

Red wrote on his note-pad.

Mom read it out for him: _School._

The counsellor’s face, young, tired – there weren’t that many counsellors employed in the government hospitals, and her hours must be long – scrunched up a little. Probably, she was thinking that Red didn’t talk much even in writing.

_School,_ the counsellor repeated, after a moment. _Are you saying that the social anxiety became worse in school?_ She looked at Red’s mother. _Was his selective mutism explained to his teachers and classmates? Did he not continue to see his therapist?_

At that point, neither Red nor his mother had felt like explaining to the woman that in a Kanto school, like in any other Kanto school, being different wasn’t something that any amount of explanation could fix.

Or that, more simply, when Red was six years old and the alimony payments stopped coming, seeing a therapist regularly enough for it to make a difference had stopped being possible.

His mother’s knuckles had been white. She blamed herself, Red knew, for Red’s inability to speak. She thought she should have intervened more at school. Worked an extra job or two so that they could pay for continued therapy.

It was exactly that self-blame that, sometimes, made Red resent her.

As if he didn’t have to enough to feel sorry for.

Two weeks later, and Viridian Forest, with its once-promise of possibility, was a gleam of green and shadow beneath the broad expanse of Pidgeot’s wings.

Green said: “Are you okay?”

And Red couldn’t say anything at all.

Whatever he said, it would be a lie anyway.

Green let him off at the gateway to his house.

Red tipped his cap in thanks, stood with a hand on the gate to watch his friend fly away. Probably, it was polite.

Pikachu drummed his paws on Red’s head, as if reminding him that even if the doctors had declared Red fully – and miraculously, they’d emphasised –recovered, they’d also said that he was weak, and far from healthy. A few months at home, regular check-ups, physical therapy sessions and counselling sessions – Red’s mother had looked at the hospital bill, and at the list of recommended treatments, and closed her eyes.

Green slid off Pidgeot, called his Pokemon back into his Ultra Ball, and regarded Red for a minute. “I said I’d visit Gramps. You want to come with? I’m going to ask one of his researchers to check over my team for me while I’m there. You haven’t met a couple of my current roster.”

Red paused, and then nodded.

“Arcanine can take you.”

Red wanted to walk.

He managed fifteen steps, and then sat down on the pavement.

Pikachu’s weight slid from his shoulder into his lap. Meaningfully: “Pika.”

“Arcanine it is,” Green said. Took a Great Ball from his belt. “You know, no-one expects you to make a miraculous recovery or something. Cut yourself some slack.”

Three years ago, Green would have first in line to mock Red for any kind of slack.

The thought was sudden, and bitter, and uncharitable. Green had brought him to the hospital. Interceded with the doctors. Called his mom, and taken care of the Pokemon Red had left at the Centre.

Green had closed the Viridian Gym for a day just to fly him home.

Three years had passed since Red last saw his friend, white-faced with fury and shame in the Champion Room as Lance proclaimed a new Champion, twenty-six minutes after the first one had won his title.

Of course, Green’s fury and shame had smoothed into blank marble when Professor Oak barged in and congratulated Red on his victory.

Green’d always been like that. All bright, brittle, violent emotion, which he would suddenly, without explanation, without warning, shut down behind sky-high, iron-fast walls. The walls reflected the harsh arrogance of a noon sun, but revealed nothing of what lay behind.

Red had once thought he knew how to read all the cracks in those walls. The fine, hair-line fractures that told a story if one only knew how to look.

And then Green’s parents had died. A year had passed. And one month before Red’s tenth birthday, his best friend stopped speaking to him.

Green was inexplicable. Impenetrable. Untouchable. A friend, and then not. Someone who didn’t wait for Red to speak, but accepted it when he did, and that with the same ease that a fish might accept a river winding out into the ocean.

Someone who’d promised to journey with Red through the mysterious promise of Viridian Forest. Who’d promised they’d go together. Instead, he’d left on his own.

Looking at him now, Red felt that old, bitter fury rise like the sea inside of him.

He ignored Arcanine, who’d started nosing around his folded legs with the caution of a Pokemon warned against jostling an injured person. He picked up Pikachu and put his friend on the ground, so that he could get himself up.

Pikachu made a noise of alarm.

Red ignored him to take one step. And then another. And another.

He’d lived for three years on top of a mountain.

He’d beaten every trainer that came to battle him. Ethan had been the only exception. The only Champion who’d beaten Lance, instead of having been beaten by Lance and then sent to Red for the experience.

Still, Red had beaten all of the almost-Champions easily. And the loss to Ethan had been close. Between the two of them, Red had made it back down Mount Silver first.

The point was: Red had survived on his own. He’d fought on his own. He’d chased Team Rocket out of Kanto on his own.

He could make the twenty or thirty more steps to Green’s front door on his own.

His foot scraped over a rock.

Arcanine yelped. Pikachu leapt between him and the ground.

A hand grabbed his arm, and yanked him upright. “What do you think you’re doing?” his childhood friend snapped. “Didn’t you hear me? I just said cut yourself some slack!”

Red stared up into his friend’s face. And then he ducked his head.

The grip loosened.

Between them, they managed to get Red sitting on the bottom step of the stairs to Green’s house. Just a step before the gate.

Green called Arcanine back into his Pokeball.

Pikachu climbed back into Red’s lap.

Green crouched in front of him. “Hey,” he said, eyes wary. “What did you think you were doing?”

In three years, Lance had been the only one to visit him atop Mount Silver. He’d flown up on Dragonite about seven months after Red made it to the peak. He’d brought supplies with him, and batteries for Red’s PokeGear. He’d said: _Your mother got your letter, and they’ve called off the search. I just came to check on you._ And then, when Red’s only response was to shake his head, in some futile attempt to get him to leave, Lance had nodded, and said: _Red. Your letter was clear, and no-one besides me and your mother will know where you are. But I was thinking: how would you feel if I sent some promising trainers to you? I won’t tell them your name. It would give them a challenge, and you something to do._

Red had thought about it for two days after Lance left. And finally, waking up one day to a dead fire because Charizard – Green’s Charizard, which he’d left with Daisy for Red before departing for the Sevii Islands – had fallen asleep and forgotten to relight it, Red had sent a missive to Lance with his agreement. If anything, battling had never made him feel cold.

To the agreement, he’d added a note, despite himself. _When Green gets back, please tell him where I am._

Even now, Red didn’t know why he’d written that note. Only that, fingers numb, his childhood friend’s Charizard puffing warm air in his direction, this Pokemon that’d been left to him with neither explanation nor apology, Red felt like he was drowning. 

He’d wanted to see Green. Green would only make him feel worse. But Red had wanted to see him anyway.

A year later, and he heard from Lance that Green had come back, and taken up the Viridian City Gym leadership. That Green knew that he was on Mount Silver.

A year after that, and Ethan climbed the mountain.

A month again after that, and here Red was, sitting on the stone step in front of his childhood friend’s closed gate.

Pikachu swept its tail over his arm, as if trying to soothe crackling fur.

Green, crouched in front of him, eyes pale brown with the afternoon sun, face closed but not hostile, reached out a hand.

Red knocked it aside.

He didn’t mean it to parallel what Green had almost done, that first day Red came down the mountain.

He could see the echo in his friend’s face anyway.

_Why didn’t you come,_ Red had made the mistake of asking.

_Why did you go up there in the first place,_ Green had fired back.

This was what Red told himself every day. He might not be able to speak. He might lock up when adults asked him questions, and when children taunted him. But words hadn’t been necessary, charisma had been unimportant, when it came to defeating Giovanni and Team Rocket. When it came to winning the Championship.

This was what Red told himself every night. He might, sometimes, not want to get up in the mornings, because getting up was too hard. And maybe, just maybe, he’d come down Mount Silver not because Ethan defeated him, but because on the morning that Ethan had defeated him, Red had woken up and gone to the edge of Mount Silver’s peak and contemplated, not for the first time, what it would be like to take a step, just one step, into thin air. And on that morning, too, he’d realised that what he was contemplating, on the edge of the peak, Pikachu determinedly clinging to his shoulder – it wasn’t just idle speculation.

Five hours before Ethan came up the mountain, Red had looked down at his skinny, cold-chafed arms, at Pikachu’s claws digging into his faded jacket, and he’d felt a spark of fear. At what he was doing to himself.

But Red told himself, whatever the reason he’d gone up Mount Silver, and whatever the reason he’d come down again, it didn’t change the fact that he was capable. He was resourceful. He couldn’t do a thing besides win battles, but he could win them.

So, he lifted his chin. Looked his childhood friend in the eye, and said, without words: _Get away from me._

Green blinked, once.

And then he stood up, and back. “Get up yourself then,” he said. “I’ll let Gramps and Daisy know you’re here.”

Victory tasted like nothing in particular. After the gate swung closed, Red kept sitting on the step. Pikachu squirmed a little in his lap, nosing with something that seemed like disapproval at Red’s face.

_Don’t you hate Green?_ Red gestured at him. A tilt of his head, a twist of his mouth.

Red didn't hate Green, Pikachu pointed out with a dismissive tail-wave. So what point had he been trying to make, by slapping Green’s hand away like he was a Pichu touching a Berry that wasn’t good to eat?

Red didn’t have an answer.

A soft, warm weight landed abruptly on his shoulder, and then a tangle of brown fur tumbled onto Pikachu’s head.

Pikachu squawked.

Eevee righted herself, patted at Red’s Pokemon with something like apology, and then turned large, dark eyes onto Red. She’d been sent to make sure neither of them did anything stupid, she conveyed with a twitch of fluffy, perfectly-groomed ears.

When Red had seen her, that first time at the Gym, he’d thought her the most well-cared-for Pokemon he’d ever seen in Green’s company. It was why he’d wanted to touch her. To see if she was real.

Now, of course, after seeing Arcanine, and Machamp, he knew that the level of care was the new standard for all of Green’s Pokemon.

It made him wonder if Charizard should go back. If Charizard was meant to go back.

Green’s curt note: _Keep him,_ had never explained why, or how long.

Oh, Red thought, as pain trickled from his tired, weak limbs to his centre. He and Charizard had gotten used to each other, after three years. Venusaur and the rest, they’d warmed up to him too.

Red would miss him, if he went back to Green.

Red had missed Green too.

All of this old, tired anger, it wasn’t anything new, or different. It was just what had taken root years ago. Green didn’t need him. Well, Red didn’t need him either.

Three years, and that hadn’t changed.

Green kept away for the next couple of months. Red had made it clear that was what he wanted, so who was Green to deny him.

“The two of you, really _,_ ” Daisy sighed, the tenth time she brought it up, and Green reiterated that he wasn’t going to force himself into Red’s space. She put her brush down, patted Eevee on the head, and proceeded to give him the usual fortnightly update. Green could never quite bring himself to stop her, not when she sometimes mentioned issues or problems that he was compelled to try and help solve.

The first time Daisy had come to Viridian after Red’s hospital discharge: Red’s mom was worried about how she would afford the hospital bills for his care, and the subsequent treatments.

“What about the Championship winnings?” Green suggested, after a heroic effort at _not_ speaking and _not_ interfering, because Red had made it clear that he didn’t want Green anywere near him, and that probably included his business. 

“Delia won’t want to take them _,_ ” his sister had answered. “You know how she always says that Red is her child, and she’ll take care of him and not the other way around.” And then Daisy had looked thoughtful. “But as long as it’s his medical expenses and not the household bills, maybe it’ll work.”

It did work. The next time Daisy came, she told him that combined, the interest on the Championship money plus the winnings from Mount Silver amounted to more than enough to pay the hospital fees, the physical therapist, and the counsellor.

“A counsellor,” Green echoed.

Daisy smiled at his instinctive distaste. “We found a good one, don’t worry. He’s worked with other children who have selective mutism. Pikachu hasn’t electrocuted him yet.”

Green didn’t remember much about Red’s therapist when he was a child.

He did remember that the school counsellor, with his constant, thinly-veiled scepticism that Red could speak, he just didn’t want to, so that couldn’t be anxiety, it had to be some kind of behavioural disorder. Acting out, perhaps, because his father had left the family, and his mother wasn’t providing enough discipline.

They weren’t at school anymore.

And it wasn’t as if things could go on the way they were. The physical injuries, the sharp and obvious deterioration in what had once been passable communication skills aside, Green had only had to look at Red, the last time, to know that his childhood friend was skating the edge of some kind of thin, invisible line.

So he kept his mouth shut, led his sister into the clothing store she’d agreed to visit with him, and enlisted her help in finding a suitable tie for Ethan’s induction ceremony the next week.

Red didn’t turn up at the induction ceremony. He did send a nice card to Ethan, the terrible scrawl on it suggesting he’d written it himself, and which said something along the lines of: _You’ll do great. I hope you enjoy being Champion._ Green could just see the media trying to wrangle that into something dramatic: a petty jab, a grand challenge; and decided to intervene before they could settle on a narrative. This took the form of a hearty back-clap, and a long, charming, and utterly boring speech about how much of Red’s best qualities there were to see in the kid. Half-lie, half-truth, but the press soaked it up. At the end, Green gave Ethan his number. _In case you need shit,_ he said. _Really need it. Don’t call me otherwise._

Three months after they’d found a solution to the financial problem, Daisy dropped by Viridian again to see a regular client of hers in the city, and to deliver the news that Red’s health was improving nicely. He could walk longer distances; he was gaining weight; and though he wasn’t speaking to anyone besides his mother yet, he was starting to sign to Daisy and Gramps with something like the regularity of the past.

“Also,” his sister said, waving over the waiter at their favourite Viridian katsudon restaurant, “he wants to know if you want Charizard back.”

“Obviously not,” Green snapped. “What the heck?”

Daisy gave the waiter their order. Then said: “Isn’t Charizard your starter? Red’s already had him for three years.”

“Charizard’s my starter,” Green said. “That’s precisely why he’s probably happier with Red than he’d ever be with me. Do you remember the little shit I used to be?”

His sister said nothing for a moment. And then she clasped her hands together on the wooden table. “Is that why you have so few of your Pokemon from your trainer days?”

The subject-change made his head spin. “What?”

“You used to switch them out quite frequently, I remember,” Daisy said, tranquilly. “But you’ve kept the same team for years now. I’ve been meaning to ask.”

“I use different teams all the time for gym battles.”

“All new Pokemon,” she said. And then, at his look of incomprehension: “Alakazam and Raticate, your oldest Pokemon aside from Pidgeot, are both with Gramps. Exeggutor and Gyarados are with the Daycare in Johto.”

“They were part of my Championship team,” he said. “They’re too strong to deploy against baby trainers. And I’m hoping Exeggutor and Gyarados will each befriend a nice, well-mannered Pokemon and produce interesting Eggs.”

“You released Heracross when you got to the Sevii Islands.”

“He liked the Berry Forest.”

“Rhydon was traded to a trainer in Kalos last year.”

“Rhydon got to evolve into Rhyperior, and I got Larvitar. He’s a Pupitar now, actually.”

“And Charizard has been with Red since you lost the Championship, and left not a week after.”

Green scowled. “Charizard can stay with Red.” 

“So of your current primary team,” his sister said, “Pidgeot is your only Pokemon that you took with you to challenge the League. The others you actually use are Arcanine, who you caught when you were eleven but never trained; Machamp and Eevee, who joined your team after the Championship battle with Red; and Pupitar, who you traded for.”

“You forgot Aerodactyl,” Green said.

“You’re still waiting for the people at Cinnabar Lab to revive him.”

Green didn’t know why he felt like he was being backed into a corner. He was having dinner with his sister, in a perfectly nice restaurant, surrounded by customers and flanked by a lovely night view of Viridian Forest. “I had to use six Pokemon against Ethan. There’s Tauros.”

“You use Tauros when five Pokemon aren’t enough,” Daisy tapped her fingers against her glass of green tea. She didn’t take her eyes from Green’s face. “But you only use him then.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to ask you, Green, if all the Pokemon you had when you were eleven – are they all somewhere else? What about Sandslash, Cloyster, Magneton, and Ninetales?”

He hadn’t known his sister had such a memory for his old Pokemon. “All with Gramps.”

“Why did you keep Pidgeot?”

He didn’t answer.

“Green,” she said.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters,” Daisy said, with the terseness that she’d learned from Gramps. “Because you’re my brother, and I wish you would stop punishing yourself for being an angry, grieving child.” 

He didn’t answer that either. His sister left soon after, climbing onto the Fearow Green had given her after he got to Lavender Town. _She completely spooked at the Ghost-type Pokemon in the Tower,_ he’d scoffed. _Pidgeot’s good enough for a Flying-type, and stronger. I won’t be rotating them out anymore, so you can have this one._

Afterward, he’d climbed the Tower a second time, met Red on the way back down, and lost yet another Pokemon battle.

Just more proof that at eleven, no matter how many battles he won, or Pokemon he caught, levelled-up, and evolved, Green could never beat a kid who clung to his own Pokemon team with all the ferocity of a child to his dearest friends. A kid who couldn’t even speak.

“Hey,” Daisy said, as she settled herself onto Fearow’s back, “How much sign language do you remember?”

“Beats me.”

Her gaze suggested that she knew that Green had never quite forgotten it. There were plenty of people who used sign language who weren’t Red, after all. No point in wasting a perfectly good skill.

Watching his sister fly away on her beautifully-groomed, glowingly-healthy Fearow, who still never failed to greet her old trainer with a friendly nudge or a trill, Green felt a sharp sting in his chest.

He turned back towards the gym.

Over the next two to three months, his sister’s updates kept coming. The doctors had cleared Red to train actively with his Pokemon again, instead of standing at the sidelines. He would occasionally speak to Daisy, if not to Gramps. He was working with Gramps on a research project, surfing in the waters by Pallet Town to observe Tentacool and Tentacruel migration behaviours.

Finally, Green came back to his Gym one day to find his trainers, all of them competent, highly-skilled, and confident in a crisis, in a flustered mess.

He glared at Red, who had taken up residence on a bench in the main battling hall, Pikachu on his head and Eevee in his lap, and said: “Tell me no challengers came and saw my trainers behaving like star-struck idiots.”

Red tipped his hat in greeting. His face was utterly blank.

Bonita cleared his throat. “His Pikachu said he came to see you.”

“His Pikachu said –” Green sighed. “All right, you lot, clear out.”

Arabella said: “What about the crisis Mr Yoshi came to ask you about? Was it resolved?”

“It wasn’t a crisis. It was his grand-daughter wandering off into Viridian Forest again. Now, scram. And tell me if a challenger comes.”

Salma coughed. “I don’t think Viridian City know what to do with a present gym leader. They’re getting you for all kinds of things, these days.”

“Shut up, I’m much more present than the first guy.”

“And not the boss of a criminal organisation,” Elan grinned. And then, presumably remembering who’d dispatched that particular criminal organisation, his gaze skittered sideways to Red, and he squeaked.

Ida clapped her twin brother and battle-partner on the back. Sent her Porygon dashing off around, between, and over everyone else’s feet. “Come on, guys. I think our fearless leader wants to talk to his friend.”

“Red and Green are _friends_ ,” Bonita said. The most star-struck of the lot, clearly. “I didn’t know that Pokemon Champions had friends.”

“I was a Champion too,” Green said. “What are you trying to say?”

His trainers looked at each other, and let Porygon corral them out of the hall.

Green turned back to look at Red.

His – friend heaved Eevee off his lap, stood up, and signed: _Your trainers like you._

What was Green supposed to say to that? Of course, they were supposed to have hated him? This was why he hated Red, sometimes.

(His sudden spike in temperature had nothing to do with the fact that Red had just signed to him. Nothing at all.)

“Yeah, well,” he cleared his throat. “I’m a good Gym Leader. Just ask Lance. I’m here at least two-thirds of the year.”

_Where do you go?_

“Where do I go?” he echoed.

He saw, from the twitch on Red’s face, that Red thought the repetition meant he was going too fast. Maybe Green didn’t know sign language anymore. Maybe it was rusty. Red looked sideways at Pikachu, who twitched its tail towards the note-book discarded on the bench.

“No, I understand you,” Green said, hastily. “I just –” I just, what? He was pathetic. “I don’t go anywhere specific. Sometimes I help Lance with League business, though I guess I don’t know if I’ll still be doing that now that Ethan is Champion.” Come to think of it, he didn’t know what Lance was going to do, full stop, now that he was no longer Champion, or Acting Champion, or Perennial Champion. “And sometimes I help Gramps with research stuff. Or, you know, I just don't feel like being here, is all, and I leave.” Usually when the shadow of Mount Silver, or the proximity of Pallet Town, got to be too much, and he _had_ to leave.

Red looked at him. Expressionless.

Green said: “Why are you here?” When he was younger, maybe he would have signed it too, because not being the only one signing between them made Red feel less alone. But he didn’t know if this Red, post-friendship Red, would appreciate Green putting them on the same level. In the same space. “I thought Daisy said you agreed to stay in Pallet with your mom. At least for a couple more months.”

Red glanced down at Pikachu, who looked back. Eevee wound herself around Green’s feet, and then climbed expertly up his leg, his arm, and onto his shoulder. She bit his ear.

“Ow,” he snapped. “What?”

Pikachu’s tail twitched. The little bastard.

Red signed: _I am staying in Pallet._ And then his fingers stiffened, briefly, as if he would fold them into fists. But he continued: _I’m sorry about last time. May I meet your Pokemon now?_

Green blanked for a minute. And then he remembered. Before Red had pushed him away, made it clear he hadn’t forgiven Green for their childhood, and wanted him nowhere near him, Green had offered to show him his Pokemon.

“Right,” Green said. “Sure. They’re out back. Only Eevee is wild enough to keep running everywhere around my Gym when I’m not here.”

Red frowned.

“Don’t look like that. Most of them are out back.” He tapped the Pokeball at his waist. “But Machamp is right here. Give me a break. I’m a Gym Leader; I’m not stupid enough to go out into the wild grass without at least one Pokemon.”

That expression was unconvinced.

Green sighed. “I am perfectly aware of the need to protect myself from the hordes of little yellow rats in Viridian Forest, all of which would love to Thunderbolt me to death.”

Pikachu’s head tilted, as if attracted by this prospect.

Green glared at him. Then made himself look back at Red. “This way.”

They left the main battling hall, and took one of the internal side corridors that was closed to challengers.

As they walked, Green said: “Did you bring yours too? I haven’t seen Charizard in a while.”

Pikachu answered, not his trainer. A series of squeaks.

“Right,” Green said, and threw open the door to the expansive backyard. He waved his arm around at the grassy area, warm with afternoon sunlight. The retractable glass roof was down today, to let the Pokemon enjoy the breeze. “Here. Oh, give me a minute.”

He put his fingers to his mouth.

The whistle brought a rumbling of movement.

Green said: “You know Pidgeot.” The Pokemon was already leaning down to pick up Red’s cap in his beak. “And Arcanine.” A fiercely wagging tail. Pidgeot let go of Red’s hat to tug Arcanine back before he could jump him.

Pikachu chirped in greeting.

“You don’t know Pupitar.” The Pokemon waved its compact shell-body back and forth in welcome, and then went to hide behind Pidgeot. “He’s shy for someone who’s set to evolve into one of the least subtle Pokemon in existence.”

Pidgeot let go of Arcanine’s tail.

“And then there’s Eevee and Machamp.” A click of the latter’s Pokeball from his belt, and Machamp was roaring in a friendly way at Pikachu. “So I guess I was wrong. You’ve met mostly everyone, really. It was just Pupitar. Sorry you had to come out all this way.”

The humour was beginning to grate on Green’s nerves, not least with how _easy_ it was. As if four years mattered little in the grand scheme of the universe.

Green, Red, and Pokemon shouldn’t, after everything, equal to anything but tears.

Red stretched out a hand to Machamp, who shook it. He looked at Green.

Green didn’t know what the anticipation was for. And then he did. “Oh. It’s just these five, really. I have other Pokemon I use in gym battles, depending on how many badges a trainer has, how many journeys they’ve been on, that kind of thing. But this is my primary team.” He pointed in a vague way toward the back of the yard. “I also have a Tauros I use sometimes. But he spends a couple of months with Gramps every now and then. Prefers being in a herd, and all that jazz.” He didn’t know why the back of his neck was burning. Why he felt uncomfortable under Red’s sharp, precise gaze. “And I’m planning to add an Aerodactyl to my team. I got an Old Amber from the Cinnabar Island folk. But he isn’t here yet. So, y’know. This is all I’ve got, at the moment.”

Silence, or stillness, really, as Red glanced at the five Pokemon in front of them, and then at Green. Finally, he signed: _What about the others?_

“What others?” Green snapped, and then regretted it. “What do you mean?”

_When we were eleven._

His chest was tight. Breathing hurt. Where did Red get off, coming here after _months_ , after telling Green to get away from him, really, literally, and then asking the same exact thing that Green’s sister had asked.

Green hadn’t known, until Daisy’d said – he hadn’t. He hadn’t realised.

“I didn’t get rid of them, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” he heard himself say, hands going to the pockets of his jeans before he could stop them. A classic defensive gesture. Even Red could read the hell out of that one. “You’ve got Charizard. And you’re keeping him, so don’t even think about it. And the rest, they’re just – somewhere where they’ll be happier.”

Red didn’t say anything. Well, of course not.

But he didn’t sign anything either.

Pikachu made a trilling noise. Inquiry. He climbed up Red’s leg, and nudged at the Pokeballs on his trainer’s belt.

Red reached down. Patted Pikachu’s head. And then plucked the first of the Pokeballs, a blue Great ball, tossing it into the air with the same efficient, authoritative air he’d had when he was eleven. (Watching him, Green was willing to bet that, even malnourished and freezing up on that bloody mountain, he’d started off each new battle with exactly that same confidence-destroying ease.)

Red pointed to each Pokemon as they manifested.

Lapras blinked bright eyes. The sun gleamed off its perfectly polished shell.

Snorlax turned over and went back to sleep, its bulk nearly flattening Arcanine.

Venusaur eyed Green with distrust. Fair enough. Venusaur had been Red’s starter.

Blastoise looked around the enclosure with interest.

Charizard looked straight at Green, and lumbered over to nuzzle warm breath into his hair.

“That tickles,” Green said, and shoved the great orange head away. “You look good.”

Smoke streamed into the air. Charizard watched it spiral with interest.

Green studied all of them. All healthy, strong, perfectly recovered from their three years up on the mountain. He knew that already. He’d been the one who’d gone to the Pokemon Centre to pick them up, after all.

But there was a question he didn’t know the answer to.

He turned to look at Red. “I figured you just didn’t think Espeon would like the cold up there, or something. Where is he?”

Red’s face was blank. And then he signed: _Six Pokemon._

“Sure, that’s official League regulation,” Green rolled his eyes. “But no-one bats an eye if you carry around an extra one or two. As long as you don’t use them in League battles, it’s just good sense to have another one along in case some trainer knocks out all six of your team.”

Red stepped away from him. Waited at Pidgeot’s side for Pupitar to poke his head out curiously. And then he waved.

Pupitar looked at Green.

Green said: “You traded him away. Or released him? Come on, it can’t be a state secret.”

Red’s shoulders were tense.

Pikachu climbed up onto Snorlax’s stomach. Beckoned Eevee up too.

Red turned back to Green. Signed: _Released._

“Okay.”

But Red’s fingers didn’t stop moving. _Couldn’t stay on mountain. Couldn't be sent to Professor Oak. So I released him._

“You couldn't send him to Gramps? Why?”

That look on Red’s face. Green had hated it even when they were children. The discomfort. Worse; embarrassment. Shame. Because Red couldn’t do what other ‘normal’ people could do. His friend hesitated. _Couldn’t go into a Pokemon Centre. Tried._

“So what, you released Espeon while you were on the mountain?” Green said, trying to process the improbable sequence of events. “Espeon don’t live on mountains in the first place. Why didn’t you give him to Lance to give to Gramps?”

Red started to sign, then stopped. Then signed again: _Before Lance found me. Charizard took me to the base of the mountain. Released him there._

That made sense. That was reasonable. Espeon was high-levelled; he was evolved; he’d taken Green’s own Pidgeot out more than once without much trouble. Whatever the apparent issue with walking into a town and finding a Pokemon Centre, Red would never have released one of his Pokemon into the wild if they were vulnerable.

Red had released one of his Pokemon.

It was hypocritical. Green had released dozens, maybe hundreds of Pokemon. Weak ones he needed only to fill up his Pokedex, battle-shy ones he’d given up on training, even ones with just the wrong combination of stats to really make his team into the perfect battle team. Releasing a Pokemon was an ordinary, completely acceptable course of action for trainers who were still working out their preferences, their battle styles and objectives. There was nothing wrong with it.

But Espeon had been with Red since Celadon City.

Espeon had won the Championship with Red.

Red saw all his Pokemon as friends, even family.

Eevee had jumped off Snorlax and come to nose around Green’s feet. He bent down to pick her up, stroke her ears the way she liked it.

When he lifted his head, he saw Red looking at him. With anticipation. Resignation.

Green said: “You must have been in a really bad place, huh?”

His friend’s hands twitched, stiff at his sides. The white brim of his cap tipped forward to hide his eyes. On his right wrist, the black sweat-band that he liked to wear as some kind of attempt at colour symmetry with the watch strapped around his left, slipped forward. Still loose on a too-skinny limb.

Green made himself meet his gaze. “You want to know why I’ve still got Pidgeot?”

All of his own Pokemon, except Eevee, in his arms, and Pidgeot, waiting patiently for Pupitar to stop hiding and say hello, had already started to disperse. The Gym was their home, after all. And they’d met the person Green’d wanted them to meet.

Red’s Pokemon stayed where they were. This wasn’t their home. And to everyone except Charizard, Green was a threat.

He spoke each word clearly. Because, somehow, this was important. That Red should hear what Green was telling him.

“Charizard was my starter,” he said. “And you know already – I didn’t pick him because I wanted him. I picked him to spite you. It’s really that simple.”

Eevee licked his cheek.

He tried not to tighten his grip on her. She would bite him. “But Pidgeot, Pidgey, he was the first Pokemon I ever caught. And when I caught him, sure, I was thinking – look, a Pidgey, I need to fill my Pokedex. Still, he was the _first_ Pokemon I’d ever caught. I was excited. I was happy. I was thinking – maybe this will be everything I ever thought it would be. As exciting as it had to have been, for my parents to do it over and over again. Keep doing it, until they stopped coming back.”

Red was silent.

Red was always silent.

Green didn’t think he’d heard him speak once since they were nine years old.

Wasn’t that Green’s own fault? His fault, for pushing his best friend away, because of some stupid conviction that – what, if he hurt Red, he himself would stop hurting?

Daisy was wrong. He’d been a grieving, angry child. That didn’t mean that forgiving himself would fix anything.

“So I kept Pidgeot,” he finished. “I’ve still got Pidgeot.”

Eevee was a heap of warm, soft fur. Eevee was anchoring him to this spot. Eevee, and Pidgeot, who tilted his head as if he understood everything that Green was saying.

Red watched, unblinking, as if he understood what Green was not saying.

It was unnecessary. After three years, after four, really – and added to that, all these months staying away from Red as if he could apologise by not existing – Green was done with forgiveness. He was done with wanting it.

Anyone who would forgive him was already gone. There was just Pidgeot. And Red.

So, Green said: “I know you’re angry at me. I’m angry at me, for the little shit I was when I picked Charmander to beat your Bulbasaur. When I used my Pokemon like they were tools to win myself fame and glory. When I stopped being your friend.”

A muscle moved in Red’s jaw.

“But I’m angry at you too, now. You climbed up that fucking mountain. You went up there first, and you didn’t come back.”

The sunlight beat down on their heads. It’d been winter when Red came down the mountain, and now, nearly six months later, it was spring. Even on a particularly bright and sunny day like this one, the breeze was still crisp enough to cut into Green’s skin.

“Why the hell would I climb it after you? So you could spook and go somewhere else? You didn’t need to go up there at all. You won. You beat me.”

He wasn’t shouting. He wasn’t. He knew better than to shout at someone who, even at eleven, wouldn’t flinch from a Team Rocket Grunt, black-clad and armed with poison Pokemon.

“You won, you didn’t need to leave.”

_Did you?_ Red signed, with precision.

Green set his jaw.

Between the two of them, Green had always been the one to hate the cold more than Red did. Red would wear short sleeves to school in the winter, even though Pallet Town was by the sea and its long, rocky coast was often whipped with freezing winds in the cold months. Green wouldn’t be caught dead outside his house without a nice, thick jacket. Sometimes, he’d even wear one of the long, warm cloaks that he and Daisy’d inherited from their mom. They were adventurer’s cloaks, Daisy had explained, and they’d been the fashion in Kalos when their mother was young.

Red was wearing short sleeves now.

Green was wearing a jacket.

Red’s expression was as still and quiet as snow.

There were a dozen different responses, some of them constructive, some of them not. Green thought of his sister, flying away on Fearow across the expanse of Viridian Forest, and found himself saying, honestly: “Yes, I did.” 

Red blinked, as if in surprise. Then, his gaze flickered sideways, toward Pupitar. Pidgeot. Pikachu, who’d scrambled off Snorlax to plant himself firmly by his trainer’s white-and-black sneakers.

Red adjusted the brim of his cap.

Green waited.

Thin, but stronger, haler fingers than when Green had seen them last, sketched out a reluctant, but unmistakeable message into the air. _I did too._

It wasn’t anything Green didn’t already know. Hadn’t already guessed.

But it made his teeth grind anyway. “What happened?”

Red paused.

Pikachu hopped up his leg, and onto his shoulder.

Red looked at his Pokemon for a long, silent moment. And then he turned his head back to Green. _Do you know,_ his hands stilled. And then shifted into finger-spelling. The _katakana_ weren’t familiar.

“Aion,” Green echoed. “What’s that? Some foreign word?”

_It means time._

“I don’t know it.”

A vague wave of his hand. Red hadn’t either.

“Well, where did you hear it?” Green began, and then lost patience. “What are you getting at?”

Red’s mind, Green had learned from childhood, worked in strange, often random, and apparently illogical patterns. Their teachers had often thought it was part of his selective mutism, like anxiety made you crazy.

Green knew that it was just Red. And whatever made Red, y’know, Red.

It wasn’t as if other people, including their dumb teachers, were paragons of rationality.

Snorlax let out a snore loud enough to shake the branch above him.

Red looked down at his hands. Seemed to find something suddenly uncomfortable about signing. He pointed upward instead, and patted Pidgeot’s wing. Gestured in an ambiguous, expansive way at his own Pokemon, still sitting – or sunning, in Venusaur’s case – in a half-circle around them.

Green wasn’t psychic.

He was great at guess-work. “You want to go back up Mount Silver. No way.”

Red’s hands twitched. And then he patted Pidgeot’s wing again, more deliberately.

“You want to go together.”

A short, sharp nod.

Guessing, Green knew from experience, didn’t mean he understood a fucking thing.

“Wait here,” Green said, curtly. “I don’t have anything in the kitchen, so I’m going to call delivery. Pizza all right?”

Red glanced at him.

His friend gestured Eevee to stay, then took his PokeGear from his pocket and left the kitchen. 

Anger carried around for a long time was hard to get rid of. This was what Aaron, the counsellor Red’s mom had found, had said, one of the few times Red had brought himself to talk about Green. Usually, they talked about other things. Practical things. Red’s anxiety. Red’s three years on the mountain. _Why_ Red had gone up the mountain was another topic they’d only skimmed over.

When they didn’t talk, they did exercises, or challenges, like re-learning sign language. Then using sign language more frequently with his mother. Then using it in public with his mother. Then using it with Daisy.

It was slow, painstaking progress, slower than Red remembered with his first therapist when he was six.

“It’s not a League challenge”, Aaron said, when he expressed this frustration. “Or a linear graph. You don’t need to do it better every time. You don’t need to do it faster. We can go at your pace, whatever that is.”

Red stared at him, and wondered how to explain the obvious. Since the age of six, or seven, really, because Red had been born in August, and gone to school the April following his sixth birthday, everyone had told him that he needed to do better. He needed to learn faster. Even his mother, who’d never reproached him for not speaking, had, sometimes, when she was tired from working or anxious about their living expenses, asked him if he couldn’t grow up more quickly. All children in Kanto left home at the age of eleven. They had to be adult enough, mature enough, to survive on the road for at least a year.

Aaron’s gaze flickered, and he smiled. “Do you know, there are three concepts of time in ancient mythology? Kronos, kairos, and aion. Kronos is empirical time, and so it is divided into past, present, and future. Kairos is opportune time, the moment when the right action will lead to success. Kronos is quantitative; kairos qualitative. Kronos is observed, and kairos is judged. How do you think aion is defined?”

Red had never been much interested in school, beyond what he needed to know for his Pokemon journey. Some of his classmates had studied harder, intending to join those children who would go journeying for the usual minimum period of one year, and then return to enter middle schools. So he only shrugged.

Aaron said: “Aion is time unbounded. Neither observable, nor judged. Neither linear, nor limited. Aion is time in and of itself.” His Crobat, hanging upside down from the rafter above Red’s bed, opened one eye, then closed it. “It’s okay to think of time as just time, Red.”

Two weeks after that conversation, and after the doctors had cleared him for training again, Red took Charizard and went for a flight around the coast of Pallet Town. As the wind rushed through his hair, and Charizard spread his wings broad and gleaming, Red looked down at the shadow the two of them cast, a patch of darkness that skimmed the long grasses and clear waters surrounding his hometown. And he reflected: it’d been nearly three and a half years since he’d flown in winds this warm, or in sun this forgiving.

The skies above Mount Silver were beautiful but harsh, sharp and brittle with cold and immense height. The winds were strong, and the light blinding.

Green had flown him back on Pidgeot weeks ago, after the hospital discharge, of course. But Red had been paying attention to other things. Discomfort, exhaustion, the spectre of failure that loomed always behind, and above, and right in front of him.

_Aion is time unbounded_ , he heard Aaron say in his head. 

Charizard swept low to the ground, clawed feet brushing the tips of the grasses. Red heard himself laugh.

Caught himself, the sound high, and brittle, and unexpected, and nearly tumbled off Charizard’s back in surprise.

Green’s Pokemon surged upwards in an attempt to knock Red back into place.

Arms locked around a long, warm neck, face pressed into leathery hide, Red felt again like he was suspended on that line between despair and normality.

But this time, the line was broader. It was wide enough for him to dig his feet into the earth, and breathe.

Three weeks after that, the Tentacool and Tentacruel project concluded, and Red summoned the courage to gather up his six Pokeballs, attach them to his belt, and fly to Viridian. He’d considered walking, but there was part of him that still shied away from even the happier, simpler moments of his Pokemon journey. As if they were the tip of an iceberg he wanted to remain beneath the sea.

He met all of Green’s Pokemon.

He told Green how he’d had to let Espeon go.

And when Green got angry at him, Red didn’t know what to say, because _he_ was angry too. He was angry; he’d been angry. A petty, childish fury, at not just Green, but at the children who’d mocked them both, at the man who’d left Red’s mom, at himself.

It wasn’t just Green.

That didn’t make it better.

_Time is just time._ Aaron was wrong. The only place that time could be just time, because there were no people to watch it pass by, and as it passed by, count the minutes, the hours, the days, the years that Red didn’t measure up to standards – was a mountain high enough to pierce through clouds, and cold enough to rattle bone.

Red hadn’t been angry on Mount Silver.

He’d been alone.

And so, when he’d replied Green’s own anger with: _Let’s go up Mount Silver together,_ it’d felt somehow inevitable.

Unexpected, but inevitable.

Green’s agreement was the same. 

The evening light shone through the kitchen windows. Red watched Pikachu and Eevee draw patterns on the glass with their paws.

Green appeared back in the doorway to the kitchen.

“Hey,” he said. “I ordered pizza. Pineapple, the way you like it.” Then he hesitated. “Right?”

Red watched him.

The pendant at Green’s neck was on a shorter cord that Red remembered. Its glassy, cloudy surface glimmered in the fluorescent lights of the kitchen. The white-painted walls, and darker wood cabinets, the same as the walls and furniture in the rest of the apartment, gleamed too. Neat, clean lines, pendant and apartment both, just as neat and clean and organised as the rest of Green’s new life seemed to be.

In three years, Red had become a rumour, a shadow of a memory. He’d kept all of the Pokemon he’d trained from the age of eleven, with the exception of Espeon and Mewtwo. Even the clothes he wore were the same cut, design, and material that they’d been when he first left Pallet Town, because he’d wanted them to be. He’d worn the same three outfits on Mount Silver for years, after all. There was a comfort in familiarity.

Green was different. In three years, Red’s childhood best friend had changed from the angry, carelessly-arrogant and sometimes-cruel child he’d been to someone else altogether. A gym leader whose subordinate trainers seemed to like as well as respect him; whose community sought his help; and a trainer whose Pokemon looked well-fed, well-rested, and happy.

Fourteen-year-old Green lived above the Gym where he worked, in his own apartment. He travelled. He gave his Pokemon away, and kept only his second-oldest.

He’d stayed away for six months because Red asked him to. 

If it weren’t for the pendant still around his neck, and the particular challenging slant of his grin, he could have been a stranger.

_Time is just time,_ Aaron had said.

That in itself, Red thought, was a broken promise. A disappointment.

Because even when Red had lived on a mountain where time often seemed not to exist, it’d continued to flow on below the mountain.

And Red, as always, had been left behind.

Green was waiting for his answer, a hand stretched out to pet Eevee, and gaze skimming between his Pokemon’s ears and Red’s face.

_Pineapple is fine,_ Red signed. And, because he couldn’t make himself sign ‘thank you’, he pulled down the brim of his cap instead.

His friend gathered Eevee into his arms, and nodded, tightly. He said nothing at all.


	2. Chapter Two

**Chapter Two**

They didn’t go up straight away. Green refused to go without the proper equipment, and he wouldn’t trust Red to prepare everything, even if he had managed to survive there for three years by himself. Survive, Red’s friend seemed to say without saying anything at all, was a relative term.

Mom thought more or less the same thing, even if she, too, never said anything. So Red decided to let it go.

“A month,” Green stipulated, leaning back in his leather-backed office chair. There was a steaming cup of coffee in front of him. A glass of iced green tea for Red. “Aerodactyl will have revived by then, and I’ll have had some time to train him.”

Red nodded. A full Pokemon team would be helpful if they planned to make it to the top.

“Really? The wild Pokemon that bad?”

Red only looked at him.

Green sighed. “I’m going to Cinnabar in a week. You can come with, if you want.”

Red shook his head.

“All right,” his friend said. His PokeGear beeped. He glanced at it, and downed his coffee. “Looks like I’ve got a challenger to wipe the floor with. You can head on home.” 

Pikachu leapt onto Red’s shoulder.

Wary. “You don’t have to watch.”

 _Afraid you’ll lose?_ Red signed.

His childhood friend set his jaw. “It’s part of the job description to lose every once in a while, you know. The Champion is the guy who gets to destroy hopes and dreams.”

Red didn’t know how to say that that wasn’t what he’d meant.

Eevee pawed at the door.

Green’s gaze flickered to her, and then he looked back at Red. 

Red had eaten sandwiches for breakfast. Ham, cheese, and crisp brown bread from a Kalosian bakery. (Green always ate Kalosian bread; Red hadn’t eaten it for years.) The tea in front of him was from a vending machine by the Gym that hadn’t been there when he defeated Giovanni.

This was the longest he’d spent with Green since they were nine years old.

He signed: _I’ll watch._

The Viridian Gym Leader had his office on the second floor, just down the corridor from his private apartment. An elevator allowed a quick, direct trip to the ground floor, and the main battling hall.

The hall, Red had already observed when he arrived yesterday, had been completely re-modelled from when he’d battled Giovanni.

It was long, rather than wide, and the floor could be switched in and out. One floor was pitch-black, composed of moving tiles. Green’s trainers stood in designated sections amongst the tiles, ready to battle those challengers who figured out how to make it to them. When that happened, one-third of the floor would switch out to become a half-sized battle arena. First were three horizontal battle arenas, where trainers would battle Bonita, Arabella, and Salma; and then the rare challenger who made it past all three of them would take on Ida and Elan in a double battle on a vertical arena. Beyond Ida and Elan was a raised platform. The Gym Leader’s dais.

Green skipped the stairs and leapt up, with his usual flair, onto the dais. “So,” he said, and the lazy drawl of the word brought back sharp, sudden memories of an eleven-year-old boy. One who’d challenge Red to a battle whenever they met, and then disappear with a cutting remark or unsolicited advice. “Who’s my challenger?”

A girl about their age, fourteen or older, stepped up to the bottom of the dais. “That’d be me. I’m May, from Littleroot Town in Hoenn.”

Elan said: “She’s got seven badges.”

“Seven badges,” Green repeated. “Impressive. And you’re a-ways from home, aren’t you? Your second journey?”

The girl was quiet. A complicated expression flickered over her face. And then she said: “Yes, sort of. I didn’t really finish my first journey. I thought – I guessed that it wasn’t really for me.”

“Yeah?” Green said. Lifted a hand. The moving tiles on the black floor winked out of existence, giving way at first to a faceless expanse of stone, and then to smooth, packed dirt, marked up with thick white lines. A full battle arena. “Well, whatever, you’re here now. And I’m not a patient guy, so let’s get started.”

Ida, standing closest to Red, smiled at him. “That’s our cue to get off the floor.”

“The bleachers are a good view,” Her brother chimed in, already heading for the stairs.

Red’s gaze went up. Unwillingly. There were already a few scattered viewers above the training hall floor. A woman in an orange fishing jacket. A boy with a large straw hat. A pair of girls who looked like twins, a Mankey sitting beside them.

The bench where Red had sat yesterday, just by the main doors, was empty.

“We don’t get Green battling seven-badge trainers all that often,” Ida said. “This should be exciting.” She took off after her brother.

Red looked back.

Standing against the high black wall, the green, serrated leaf-shape of the Earth Badge emblazoned above him, Green looked confident. Relaxed.

He’d looked anything but in the Champion’s Room, three years ago.

 _“I’m the Pokemon League Champion,”_ eleven-year-old Green had said. _“Do you know what that means?”_

Red hadn’t answered, caught instead by the gold-brown of his friend’s hair and eyes in the stark lights of the arena. The bright scorn in his voice.

 _“I’ll tell you_. _I’m the most powerful trainer in the world!”_

And as Red called out his first Pokemon, he could only think, through the noise pounding in his ears: he’d show Green what a lie that was.

A powerful trainer? A powerful trainer wouldn’t work his Pokemon to the bone the way that Green did. A powerful trainer wouldn’t beat up a couple of Rocket Grunts to show off his strength, and then disappear before the job was even halfway done.

A powerful trainer, the Indigo League Champion, wouldn’t sound that exhausted. That defeated. That furious and scared.

“Pika-pika,” Red’s Pokemon nosed at his ear.

Red couldn’t look at him.

He followed Ida and Elan, and the other three Gym trainers, up onto the second floor. But he didn’t sit with them. He stood, instead. At the railing with his cap pulled down, and Pikachu between him and the rest of the onlookers.

“Blaziken,” the challenger shouted, from her side of the arena. “Go!”

A Fire-type Pokemon Red had never seen before erupted onto the floor of the arena.

Green smiled. An Ultra Ball expanded between his fingertips. “You know,” he said. “There’s a reason you let the Gym Leader go first.” 

Green saw Red out of the Gym.

“You going to fly home?” he asked. Eevee and Pikachu were playing behind him, skipping here and there on the lip of the fountain.

Red drew Charizard’s Pokeball off his belt. Pikachu leapt off the fountain and onto his shoulder.

Green nodded at Pikachu. “Well, guess there’s my answer. Bye, rat.”

Red’s Pokemon sparked, then sniffed and turned a jagged tail on him.

“Don’t be like that. You already ate all of Eevee’s snacks.”

A fountain-damp Eevee nosed happily at his hand.

The feeling of discordance that Red had had yesterday, watching Green in the ordered cleanliness of his apartment, had come back with a vengeance. His friend at eleven. Then at fourteen. Time (or words) slipping between Red’s fingers like white sand, packed with a thousand things he couldn’t know or understand.

Abruptly, he turned away. Tossed the Pokeball in his hand onto the green by the fountain. He didn’t say good-bye, even when Green called his name.

A month after Red asked him to climb Mount Silver with him, Green made sure his pack was filled with food, medicine, clothes, and extra clothes. Everything someone might need for a trip to the peak of a really high, really cold mountain.

“It’ll be a week at most,” he told Salma as he climbed onto Pidgeot’s back. “You’re head trainer; you know your job. Train every day. Defeat all challengers.”

“That don't meet League standards for their badge level,” Salma said, piously, and grinned. “You just don’t like saying that because it isn’t cool, boss.” And then she waved at the soft, brown, professional dampener on all attempts at garnering respect from his trainers. “Bye, Eevee. See you in a week.”

The Pokemon opened one dark eye, then went back to its nap in Green’s arms.

Pidgeot touched down in Pallet Town less than an hour later.

Daisy handed Green a wrapped bento box. “From Delia,” she said. “Gramps says to stay safe. And to look after Red.”

The subject himself set his jaw.

“Sorry,” Daisy said. “But we all remember how he came back last time.”

“Right,” Green said, not keen on being Red’s only company when he was in this mood. Especially after the abrupt, cold way he’d left Viridian four weeks ago. Not to mention the complete silence since then.

It wasn’t exactly an easy task, to arrange a trip with Red via Red’s Mom, Daisy, and Gramps instead.

Green wasn’t that happy with _Red_ , come to think of it.

Daisy raised an eyebrow.

Green stamped out whatever expression had been on his face. “We’re leaving now. Last chance to back out.”

Red rolled his eyes. Charizard’s Pokeball was already half-way into the air.

Daisy waved. “Stay safe.”

Her Cyndaquil flared in good-bye.

Cyndaquil had been Daisy’s starter, the year she turned ten and decided to defy convention and travel through Johto instead of their own region first. Not that she’d made a serious go of the League. Instead, she’d travelled wherever she pleased for seven months. And then she had come back, with a bunch of randomly-caught Pokemon, a still-unevolved and low-levelled starter, and a vague desire to go back to school. Now, she owned probably only one battle-ready Pokemon: Green’s Fearow; she had a degree in Kalosian Literature; and she ran a steady business out of Gramps’ house.

Some people might disdain those things.

At age twelve, after coming back from the Sevii Islands, Red’s disappearance hanging over his head and a new Eevee in a Pokeball at his belt, Green had thought her life figured out.

His sister had laughed when she heard this. _Little brother,_ she’d said, clapping her hands free of dust. The attic around them was cool and shadowed in the early morning. Daisy cleaned once every year or so, in the spring or the fall. Whenever the fancy took her really. _I’m six years older than you. It’s not a competition._

Disjointed. Out of whack. Non-operational. This was how he felt. _I’m a former League Champion,_ he said. The way it came out, it sounded like a challenge.

Instead of pointing out, like Green’s brain, that it’d been for only twenty-six minutes, his sister’s expression turned sober. And she said: _You were my little brother first._

He bit his tongue.

 _Come on,_ his sister said. _Mom had some Alolan Beach Glass from somewhere. I want it as reference for something._

A few months later, when Green was getting sick of Gramps’ hints that he should go back to school or the road – do something besides sit around the house all day – Lance came to offer him the Viridian Gym Leadership. He told Green where Red was, and apologized for not telling him sooner. _Team Rocket has been making trouble in Johto._

Green had barely been listening. He’d turned down the offer almost on instinct. Taken Pidgeot, Eevee, and on a whim, a little Growlithe he’d sent straight to Gramps via PC when he was eleven, and hiked up Victory Road. Blastoise and his primary team deserved a bit of a break; he left them at home.

When he emerged from the cave onto the Indigo Plateau, he headed straight not for the eponymous building, but off of the kept path. Away from the League complex, the plateau itself extended as far as the eye could see. As Green walked, the complex receding further and further behind him, the sky seemed to swell. The vast blue sky above him, the tough short grass beneath his feet, the edge of a great lake that reflected the clouds like a mirror, and the surrounding peaks of mountains higher than the plateau itself – they formed a closed world. Like the pendant around his neck: two Green and Yellow Shards joined together in a perfect circle. As he stopped near the edge of the Plateau, he felt his hand reaching up to grip the cord between his fingers.

The highest, snow-capped peak rose like a spear to the east. Pierced through a sea of clouds without even a scar.

Nearly two years later, it still did.

Charizard let out a stream of golden flame.

Red gestured in Green’s direction. _Follow me._

The plan was to land halfway up the mountain, because the air was too thin, and the winds too strong, to land safely any higher up that that.

Green stuffed his hands deep into his pockets, buried his nose in his scarf, and tried not to daydream about his nice, warm apartment, in his nice, warm Gym, in a nice, warm valley.

Ahead of him, Red was trudging his way through the snow. Pikachu was cuddled against his chest, and a single hand kept his hat from being snatched away by a sharp, icy gust of wind. He hadn’t signed, or even turned back to look at Green for over two hours. He’d just waited, when Green was slow to catch up, or signalled Pikachu into a warning burst of electricity if Green wandered too close to an overhang laden with snow.

Green was starting to go from a vague irritation to a well-defined, simmering anger.

If Red’d wanted silence and solitude, he could have climbed this damn mountain by himself. He’d done it for a month already, hadn’t he? Avoiding Green like this trip hadn’t been his idea in the first place.

A deep, calming breath sent icy cold burning through his nostrils. He coughed.

Red continued walking.

“Hey,” Green snapped at him. “When are we getting to the top?”

Not that the bastard had answered the first four times.

Green looked down, at his boots, crusted with snow and ice. He wiggled his freezing toes. Attempted to find a centre of calm that didn’t involve setting his lungs on fire.

When he glanced back up, Red was gone.

“What the fuck?”

Pikachu bounded back into view.

“What the fuck?” Green repeated.

The Pokemon sparked exasperation at Green. Stuck a paw out towards his left.

“Right,” he said, squinting through the swirling snow. “Because obviously I would see a cave in this storm.”

“Pika-pi.”

“What do you mean this isn’t a storm?”

“Pika-chu.” The drawn-out final syllable was as unimpressed as Red’s silence the past month.

“Whatever. Let’s get inside before I freeze to death out here. In the not-storm.”

The cave opening was half-covered with snow. The roughly circular chamber inside, double Green’s height and maybe triple Pidgeot’s wing-span in width, was dark. The only light was strips of fractured sun on the floor of the cave.

Red was standing deep in the chamber, away from even the strips of light. His arms were crossed, and his face shadowed. He didn't look up when Green trudged inside, just kept standing there. Statue-like. As if he were meditating to some kind of Pokemon Mastery.

A thought flitted across Green’s mind: what if, in the long months between trainers to battle, this was just what Red had done?

“Look,” he said, more curtly than was probably helpful. “Can’t you get Charizard to light this place up?”

The statue moved. A hand, reaching for a Pokeball on his belt.

A few minutes later, Charizard’s tail burned a steady, comforting flame in the half-darkness.

“This isn’t where you stayed, is it?” Green asked. “Lance said you lived on the peak.”

Red didn’t answer.

Green was getting sick of the sound of his own voice. After all, even after Red had stopped speaking to him when they were children, there’d been plenty of other people to talk to.

Daisy. Gramps, even if that was never a great option. The literally dozens of people he’d met on his journey.

He hadn’t been alone with Red for this long since – since a month ago, when they’d had a perfectly okay evening and morning together before Red went home, and decided to stop talking to him again.

“Are you pissed at me or something?” Green asked.

The only answer was the echo of the cave. The whip of the wind outside, and the patter of Pikachu’s feet as the Pokemon ran across the floor. Chasing snow-drift, or shadows. Green wouldn’t ask.

“Okay, so you’re pissed at me. That’s not new, you know. We talked about this already.”

Red’s spine was stiff. When he turned, face still half-dark with shadow, and flickered his fingers, it was a row of short, sharp signs. _Storm now. Peak tomorrow._

Green took a moment. And then he said, slowly: “Are you pissed at me about something _else_?”

A cutting motion downwards. _Stay here._

What followed was a quick stroke of Charizard’s flank, and then Red headed deeper into the cave. Charizard yawned, jaw cracking, and looked down at Green.

Shouting was not an ideal thing to do in a cave. It wasn’t. Because, Zubat and Golbat and Crobat. Just waiting to swarm out from somewhere at the slightest provocation.

So, Green stamped his foot. Stamped the other one, when he didn’t feel better. That wasn’t provocative. It was warming activity.

“Yeah, just go running off,” he said to the back of the cave. “Because that solves everything. It sure solved everything for three years!”

Okay, so maybe that last sentence came out a little louder than it should have.

Charizard grunted.

“What?” Green said. “At least _you’re_ warm.”

Maybe thirty minutes later, Red was back. With firewood from who-knew-where, and an armful of Berries. Some of them were Berries Green had never even seen before.

“Did you only eat Berries up here?” he asked, when Red and Charizard between them had gotten a hearty fire going.

Red didn’t answer.

“Your mom gave us food, you know. So we don’t have to eat Berries.”

Dogged silence.

“Fine,” Green said through gritted teeth. “We can eat your mom’s food tomorrow.”

Pikachu glanced at his trainer, and then at Green. And then at Green’s Pokeballs lining his belt.

“Eevee might kill you,” Green said.

“Pika-pikachu.”

“On your own head, then.” He pressed the button on Eevee’s ball.

His Pokemon appeared on the cave floor. Blinked large, dark eyes. And then scrambled close to the fire.

Pikachu nudged a Berry in her direction.

When the two Pokemon, plus an occasional contributing paw or tail from Charizard, were playing with Pikachu’s blue-and-yellow ball around the fire, Green looked over at Red.

His friend’s gaze was fixed on the flames.

He must, Green thought, have sat like this a thousand times. Charizard large and sleepy beside him, the other Pokemon except for Pikachu safe and warm in their balls. Pikachu, running around the floor of a dark, yawning cave.

The simmering anger over Red’s decision to ignore him like they were eleven again, and this whole trip hadn’t been Red’s idea in the first place, flared. And then doused like icy water. Because, hadn’t it been Green who hadn’t come up here? He’d known where the bastard was for nearly two years.

“You know,” he said, with all the neutrality he could summon. “I looked up that word you mentioned the last time. _Aion._ It’s a Kalosian word.”

A gaze flicked in his direction.

“It’s been a long time since I read Kalosian. And I had to use a dictionary and everything, but I got the gist. _Aion_ , time. Non-linear time.”

Pikachu and Eevee’s voices were faint echoes in the far side of the cave. Charizard’s bulk was a heap by the fire, tail burning with a steady flame.

“So, I thought,” Green said. “What, did Red hike up a mountain because he thought that time would freeze up here or something?”

The whip and toss of the storm outside had, at some point, deepened into a howling roar.

Green’s mouth was dry. “Did you?”

Red was absolutely still.

“Is that why we’re here now?” His tone was still even, calm. “Because, newsflash, buddy: you’re fifteen this summer. Time moves everywhere.”

Red’s gaze hadn’t moved from his face since he started talking. An endless stone floor, stark and polished as the default surface in Green’s Gym.

Green made a job of staring people down. How else was he supposed to frighten the socks off of baby challengers?

Finally, his friend’s fingers moved, the signs quick and suble in the firelight. Finger-spelling, because the Pokemon had no dedicated sign. _Mewtwo._

“For a subject change, that’s not even subtle.”

_Do you know him?_

“Mewtwo?” Green said. “Crazy genetically-modified psychic Pokemon that Gramps and the rest were sure’d killed you, when you didn’t come back from Cerulean Cave. Yeah, I know. Misty told me she couldn’t sleep for days, she felt so guilty.”

A slow blink.

“Don’t look like that. She calmed down when your mom got your letter and called off the search. Because obviously you hadn’t been killed near her city.”

The fire was jumping and spitting between them. Smoke rumbled from Charizard’s open jaw, where he’d turned onto his back on the cave floor.

“What did you do?” Green said. “Brought him up here because he was dangerous, and then ended up staying?”

It was flippant. It was a joke, if anything about this could be remotely funny.

Red nodded.

Green stared at him.

Red stared back.

“You brought him up here, and then ended up staying.”

Another nod. Kanto Sign Language was economical that way. Red was economical that way..

Red signed: _I released him._

A Psychic Pokemon, created and then tortured for genetic experimentation, who’d hurt people and Pokemon near Cerulean City – released into the wild like he was a common Pidgey, or even Red’s Espeon, simply ill-suited for the cold atop Mount Silver.

Maybe hiking up a mountain in the freezing cold for hours had burned out Green’s ability to react appropriately. Because he was fairly sure he wasn’t supposed to laugh.

A patter of little feet announced Eevee’s scampering back from the far side of the cave. A brown, fluffy head knocked against Green’s hand.

Green wiped a hand over his face. “Does Lance know?”

Red’s expression shifted, from that blank, stony expression that their primary school teachers had used to hate, to something different.

“Right, of course he does.”

The storm, its screech and howl, continued to rage outside the cave. The darkness, even mid-afternoon, was a living thing, tossed about by the burning flames between them.

Green’s head hurt. “Why are we here, Red?”

Pikachu, ball clutched between its yellow paws, brought the thing to Red. Dropped it by his feet and jumped onto his lap.

Green’s hands and feet were cold. Snow drifted in thin sheets from the mouth of the cave over its fire-lit, twig-and-rock-scattered floor. Charizard’s smoke streamed into the crisp air, chimney-like. Discordant in its domesticity in a place as empty and lonely as this.

“Why are we here _now_?” Green said.

Red signed: _Storm will last all night. We should leave tomorrow morning._ And then he set Pikachu down, and reached for his backpack.

_“So,” Aaron said, their first meeting after Red came back from Viridian City. “You went to see Green?”_

_His therapist’s Crobat was snoozing upside-down, claws gripping onto the curtain rail on Red’s bedroom window._

_Red signed:_ We’re going to go up Mount Silver.

_A pause, even though Mom must have already told him all about it. She had accepted Red’s decision, the way she usually supported all his decisions, but she didn’t like it. Red knew from the way her mouth tightened whenever she saw him. The way she’d gone out the other day and come back with bags full of warm, thick clothing that she folded and put away in his closet._

_He told Aaron what he had told her:_ I’ll come back.

_“I believe you,” Aaron’s voice was always gentle. Just like his Crobat’s smooth, lovingly-groomed wings. “I just want to know: what’s up there for you, Red? On Mount Silver.”_

Three weeks later, as Red put one foot in front of the other on the path up to the peak, Green following behind him in a silence punctuated with complaints about the cold and the distance and the height, he thought about his answer to that question. What was up here, in this vast land of rocks, and snow, and high, empty sky?

He’d answered Aaron.

He hadn’t answered Green. Not really.

Last night’s storm had raged into evening. They’d spent the night in the cave, then woken up early to start hiking again. When, a few hours later, the grey, misty morning had brightened into a clear afternoon, they’d taken a break to sit under a rocky overhang and eat Mom’s carefully-packed bentos for lunch. 

And now they were nearly at the peak.

Eevee had gone back into her ball. Pupitar was out. Green’d let him out of his ball a while ago, to help fight off some wild Geodude. And then he had let him stay out.

Whenever Red looked back, it was to see the shell-like Pokemon making his way up the mountain-side with Rock-type ease. Occasionally, he would make a low, grumbly sound to Green, and Green would change his hand-hold or foot-hold to a more stable rock.

“Pika-pikachu!”

Red looked up from his feet to where his Pokemon was waving vigorously. Paws and ears and tail alike. And then Pikachu bounded away up the uneven, jagged landscape, and disappeared from view.

“Is he okay?” Green asked, a few paces behind. His voice carried in the thin air.

It should be stranger than it was, Red thought, to hear his childhood friend’s voice here. To look down and see him, dark fur-lined coat and hiking pants layered over thermal-wear and thick woollen socks, trudging through snow a foot deep.

Green hated the cold.

As his trainer laboured up the last few steps, Pupitar came to a stop beside Red. A spiky head turned in the direction that Pikachu had gone.

Red hovered his hand an inch above the Pokemon.

Wide eyes, with scarlet pupils, flickered up at him, and then straight ahead. 

Red’s hand dropped, and patted the shiny, smooth spikes.

Green caught up to them. His breath came in short, shallow bursts of warm mist. “Where did the rat go? Did he see a wild Pokemon?”

Red adjusted the brim of his cap against the glare of the sun. Pupitar hopped up and down.

Green sighed. “Right.” 

Ten minutes later, the steepness of the incline began to decrease. The tree cover, which had already begun thinning a while back, disappeared. There was only bare rock, short, stubby grass mostly choked by snow, and a sky that grew vaster and more oppressive the higher they climbed.

Red concentrated on his feet. One step, and then another, and then another.

When they emerged onto what was undoubtedly the highest point on Mount Silver, Pikachu was waiting for them, small and impatient by the narrow cave entrance.

Eevee emerged from her Pokeball, as if sensing that the long walk was over. She bounded over to Pikachu.

Green studied the cave. “That’s bigger than yesterday’s digs. Did you live there?”

Pikachu and Eevee had started playing touch-the-shadow at the cave mouth. Pupitar, head tilted, watchd them with a momentary baffled tolerance, and then settled down to bask in the sunshine.

Red nodded.

“Okay,” Green said. He adjusted the straps of his backpack. Looked down, and drew the tip of one boot over a fading white line on the ground. It was one of many that Red had directed Blastoise and Venusaur in using sharp rocks to etch into place. “This is a battle arena.”

Red didn’t nod. There was no point; Green wasn’t looking at him.

His childhood friend cut abruptly toward the eastern edge of the peak.

The edge, Red knew with an intimacy that he carefully didn’t think about now, plunged sharply downwards. A steep cliff-face that extended for miles, before levelling out into bare, inhospitable rock, and then descending again into a dense green wood wound through by a glittering stream.

Green paused with his feet at the edge. He looked down.

Red watched his back.

And then his friend’s head lifted again. He grinned, thin and careless. “I guess you watched the sun rise from here.”

He stepped away from the edge, walked back towards the cave mouth. “Come on. I’m expecting the grand tour.” 

Later that night, when the fire was roaring and the Pokemon were eating bowls of Pokemon food, they ate Berries again. There was still food left. A week’s worth of it, really: canned meat and vegetables, a half-bag of uncooked rice, instant noodles, and even a couple of onigiri left over from Mom’s bento. But Red had never liked to eat all his food in one go.

He gave Pikachu a Tamato Berry. Pikachu’s ears quivered, then stood straight up.

Green said: “I feel like smoke is coming out of my ears.”

Red patted Pikachu on the head, and gave him a Pecha Berry instead.

Eevee was curled up next to the fire, nose buried in tail, ears soft with sleep. Pikachu dropped the Pecha Berry by her paw, and looked up at Red.

Red went through the dwindling pile of Berries and rooted out a Mint Berry.

“Did Mewtwo eat Berries too?” Green said.

A glance in his direction.

“What? Thought I’d ask.”

The fire crackled. Venusaur had opted to stay out after dinner, and was sleeping next to Charizard, mouth open. An ember spat near his paw, to be put out by a thick green vine. Venusaur didn’t wake.

“You know,” Green said. “If people find out that their Champion released a mentally-unstable, enormously powerful Pokemon into the wild, they’re going to have a lot to say about it.”

Red picked the stem off another Mint Berry.

“Just saying: why did you let him go? You can’t guarantee he won’t hurt anyone. The whole reason you went to Cerulean Cave in the first place was because there were reports he was hurting people.”

He looked down at Pikachu. Then picked the Pokemon up in his arms, and walked to the back of the cave.

“What,” Green called, “is there more cave back there?”

He waited. Green would understand. It was something that Red had taken a while to wrap his head around, at first in the hospital, and then later when he saw his friend again in the Viridian Gym. But, four years after they’d both stopped trying to understand anything about each other – Green could still feel his way around Red’s gestures. His language.

The knowledge was scorch-sharp, like a Tamato Berry gone down the wrong way. It was hollow and sweet, like the Pecha Berry Pikachu had given to Eevee.

Red would rather something cold, something bitter, something he knew how to taste, and therefore how to endure.

Green got up, scuffing his boots on the cave floor. “Will the Pokemon be okay?”

Red snapped his fingers at Venusaur. Soundlessly, but the vibration would be enough.

His Pokemon opened one eye. Yawned. Its stubby ears flicked.

“Right,” Green said. “Your wordless communication thing is part of what makes you seem the all-powerful mythical trainer. You know that, right?”

When Red didn’t answer, and only moved a step further into the back of the cave, his friend sighed.

With a brush of fingers over the Pokeballs clipped to his belt, and a final glance at Eevee and Charizard, he joined Red.

As they walked into pitch-black darkness, following a path Red knew by heart, he nudged Pikachu gently with his cheek.

Pikachu’s tail snapped. A glow started at the tip, then went all the way down. The shadows around them lightened. 

None of Green’s current Pokemon team could learn Flash. Alakazam would have had it, Red thought. Alakazam, who he’d seen amongst the many Pokemon in Professor Oak’s lab. Apparently, his trainer visited him once every couple of months.

He wondered if that was why Green had stopped talking.

They walked down, and down, and down the pathway, as it opened from a closed tunnel into a long, natural staircase formed from rock. Pikachu’s tail was the only light, except for when they passed by a ledge through which streamed a green-purple glow.

“Volbeat and Illumise,” Green said, for the first time in twenty minutes. His voice was quiet. “Right?”

Red tipped his cap down.

“There are a lot of them in the Berry Forest on Three Island.”

Red knew that. Volbeat and Illumise, flitting over the long grasses and between the densely crowded trunks of trees. Where they flew, they would sometimes lead travellers to patches of glowing mushrooms that an old granny on Three Islands had called foxfire.

For a moment, the thought that it would be nice to see them again skimmed over Red’s mind. An impossibility that was now a possibility. 

And then the ledge passed behind them, and the darkness made other thoughts into priorities. The worn rock beneath his feet. The distant ceiling.

The large, inky-black lake that dominated the cavern below.

They stopped at the foot of the staircase.

Green was silent.

Static cheeks sparked, a spark that travelled across the whole of Pikachu’s body, and then suddenly the whole space around them was alight.

Green’s breath was slow, and quiet. “Wow.”

Red didn’t need to look to know what his friend saw. The Zubat, Golbat, and Crobat slumbering in upside-down rows above them. The clumps of evenly-sized rocks clustered here and there, with an occasional, especially big rock in their midst: Geodude and Graveler. Sometimes, though not today, a flutter of pink wings on a high ledge might mean a Clefairy, or a patter of light feet a Chansey. And beyond the lake, deeper into the network of tunnels and corridors and caverns smaller and larger than this one, there were Onix, and Rhyhorn, and Cubone, and Kangaskhan.

Long months of exploration had sketched a mental map of the mountain into Red’s memory. The seasons; the Pokemon; the ins and outs.

That map settling into the back of his mind once again, it brought with it a distant, disjointed feeling. As if, in the long months Red had been away, something had happened that made it not quite fit anymore.

Maybe it was Green. The wonder on his friend’s face.

Pidgeot, Green had said in Viridian City, was the first Pokemon he’d ever caught. He’d been excited; he’d been happy. It’d been, for a moment, a taste of fulfilled promise. Everything they’d been told a Pokemon journey would be.

Red’s hands were icy. He put them in his jacket pockets.

Pikachu’s light receded back, slowly, until it illuminated only their immediate area again.

Green’s gaze turned in his direction.

Red signed, carefully. _Mewtwo was frightened. He was angry. He was hurt. It was bad at the beginning, and at the end._

The low light made dark eyes gleam a paler shade. Solemn, the way Green so rarely was. 

“Bad,” his friend echoed.

_We stayed here for months before I let him go. But in the end, I had to let him go._

“Just like you had to come up here.”

Red’s fingers were still cold. He fisted them.

“That is what you said, right? When I said you’d won, you didn’t have to come up here. You said that you did.”

How to explain? The victory hadn’t just been a victory. It’d been the look on Green’s face. Professor Oak’s hearty congratulations, a moment before he started in on berating his own grandson. The swirl of Lance’s cape in the Hall of Fame, and the calm cadence of his voice, as he explained: there will be a formal, televised induction ceremony. You will take over the duties of a Champion for both Kanto and Johto.

It’d been the missives arriving from Cerulean City. The silence of Cerulean Cave. The half-crazed fury and anguish on Mewtwo’s face as Red tossed a Master Ball in his direction.

The rumours he’d heard, while on the way to the cave, of Team Rocket still hiding out in the Sevii Islands.

There was no way to explain all of that. Even in sign language, even with the words that another person might have been able to speak – how should Red say: he’d won, and still nothing had changed?

So, he signed: _It doesn’t matter._

“Of course it matters.”

_It’s over._

Green looked down at his feet. The patch of shiny, emerald-green moss on the edge of the lake. “Do you really think that?”

Pikachu’s ears flicked.

“I filled Gramps’s National Pokedex,” Green said. “I became Gym Leader of Viridian City. And it still matters to me.”

Red didn’t understand.

Green’s words were quick, but even. “When you won, you became the Pokemon League Champion. You became the most powerful trainer in the world. And you were always going to. I knew, ever since we were children. So, when I beat Lance and became Champion, and twenty-six minutes later, you came walking into the room, I guessed what would happen next. Because between someone like you, and someone like me – well, the victor was a done deal.”

His tone, his expression, it was nothing like the boy who had stood opposite Red in the Champion’s Room and looked at him as if he hated him.

Nor was it anything like the Gym Leader who’d stood on the dais of Viridian Gym just over a month ago, as confident as if the leaf emblazoned over his head were his own personal emblem.

“My parents are dead. They’re dead, and I waited a year for them to come home anyway, because I was a stupid child.” Green’s gaze was bright. But not with scorn. Nor hatred. Something that made Red flinch worse than either. “And then I took my disappointment out on you. You, and my sister, and my grandfather – though, you know, the old bastard deserved some kind of rebellion. Still, I said a lot of crap, and did a lot of shitty things, for what? I accomplished nothing. Nothing great, or even good. As for all the noise in my head, it never even went away.”

Noise, Red thought. Peace, and quiet, and the peak of a mountain higher than any other mountain in Kanto and Johto both. Higher even, than the Indigo Plateau.

“So I ran off to the Sevii Islands. I came back, I took over the Viridian Gym. Every couple of months, I looked east towards Mount Silver, and decided not to climb it to see if you were alive or dead. And when Daisy took it into her head to give random strangers my number, I told them they reminded me of you.”

Green’s voice was too soft to resonate in the cave. Still, the edge of his emotion, a raw, bitter thing that made Red think of a Rabuta Berry he’d eaten once, was enough to rouse a Zubat from its slumber.

A spark of electricity from Pikachu made her quickly rethink the benefits of curiosity.

“It matters,” Red’s friend said, “Why you came up here. Just like it matters why I left. Because what’s to stop you coming up here again?”

The Rabuta Berry, Red remembered, had been something Pikachu’d found for him. Once, when Red was ill and throwing up from some poisonous Berry or under-cooked meat he’d eaten on the mountain, Pikachu had up and left for days. When he came back, it’d been with the stem of a Rabuta Berry held carefully in his mouth. He’d dropped it by Red’s shoulder. There’d been dirt on his paws, and a scratch across one ear.

When Aaron asked him why he had climbed Mount Silver, Red had answered.

Maybe it was okay to answer Green too. This Green, who was neither the eleven-year-old who’d stopped being Red’s friend, nor the fourteen-year-old Gym Leader that had long left Red behind.

He tapped Green’s arm.

His friend looked at him.

Red signed: _I was tired._

Team Rocket, the League, Green and other childhood bullies, even Red himself. He’d been more than tired. Exhausted, really. Exhaustion that made it hard to see or hear; that lived inside his bones, and dogged his every waking hour.

Because more than any single thing or emotion; more than Team Rocket, or the Champion’s title, or childish taunting, or words trapped and broken behind his teeth – there’d been this unshakeable knowledge that there was something fundamentally wrong with _him._ With Red himself.

 _I was tired,_ he signed, again. _I wanted to rest. That’s all._

Green watched his fingers move. He was expressionless.

_But after a while, after months, I realised I was just alone._

He’d been worse than alone. He’d been invisible. And the thing about invisibility, Red could not say, because the complete phrases refused to form, even in sign language – was that he could speak, and no-one would hear. He could consume a poisonous Berry or under-cooked meat, and only his Pokemon were there to care. He could walk for days through tunnels, and corridors, and caverns darker and deeper than anything he’d explored before, and there would be no-one clamouring for a battle. No-one to see if he sat against a cool, dry wall and held a hand up in front of his face to check that he still existed.

There’d been something about those moments. Something that shrivelled up what’d been already shrunken. Reflected, like a distorted mirror, everything that he’d always known was wrong with him anyway.

Red signed: _I won’t stay here again._

Green was quiet. And then he turned his head, abruptly. Took in the inky dark lake, the distant silhouettes of Pokemon, the thick moss beneath their feet. After a while, he cleared his throat. “I mean, it’s pretty enough, I guess. You can visit. I can visit.”

Pikachu’s nose was nuzzling against Red’s cheek.

They stood there, by the lake’s edge, for a while longer.

Red closed his eyes, and imagined Mewtwo in a different place from this. Not a cave, either like this one or the one by Cerulean City. A vast, open field, filled with bright flowers and soft grasses, lined on every side by leafy green trees. Their branches would be laden heavy with Berries, sweet, and spicy, and even the bitter ones good for health. Maybe, one day, a small, quick creature with pointed ears, large blue eyes, and a long, thin tail like in those pictures in the Pokemon encyclopaedias would descend upon the field. Mewtwo would have peace, and family, and everything else in between.

 _Do you identify with Mewtwo?_ Aaron had asked, when Red explained to him that it was this image that he’d carried with him, some days, as a means of getting through the passing hours. _He seems to feature quite strongly in your memories of your time there._

Red had stared at him. The strange leap of logic that his therapist had made. And then he’d shaped his fingers into the signs. _We’re too different to identify._

Mewtwo had known nothing but cruelty and isolation, from genetic creation to capture by Master Ball. Red, whose mother loved him, whose Pokemon’d stayed with him even through three years atop Mount Silver, couldn’t identify with that.

He signed: _I didn’t understand him. I just understood what he wanted. He wanted to be gone. So did I._

At some point as they listened to the lake lap against the shore, and Pikachu’s tail buzz with low electricity, Green reached over to take Red’s hand.

It wasn’t something they would have done at eleven. It was something they might have done at nine.

Red held on tight.

The next morning, he took Green to the eastern edge of the peak.

They watched the sun rise. Its golden rays washed across the dense forest, climbed up the barren rock of the mountain. The sky faded through a dozen colours: deep navy to pink to orange to a blue like the sea.

Sat there on the cliff’s edge, Green next to him, and Pikachu clinging to his shoulder as if he still didn’t fully trust his trainer not to do something stupid – it occurred to Red that he’d stopped being angry.

Maybe he’d never been angry at Green, really, at least not in the way he’d thought he was. Because Green was different, had left him behind, and had broken both every promise they’d made to each other, and some they’d never made at all.

Maybe he’d just been angry. For a long time. Three years. More.

They were only fourteen.

And even though Green kept Alakazam at his grandfather’s lab, along with some other Pokemon Red recognised from their frequent run-ins as eleven-year-old trainers; even though the rest of the Championship team Red had beaten three years ago were somewhere else altogether, somewhere Green had said they would be happier – there was still Pidgeot. Green had kept the very first Pokemon he’d caught.

And his very, very first Pokemon, his starter – he’d given him to Red.

Charizard flexed his wings in the skies above them.

As those skies turned from night into morning, and the world changed, Red nudged his childhood friend in the shoulder.

Green looked at him. His eyes were tired; his mouth a thin line. “What?” 

The thing was, thoughts, worse, thoughts rendered into speech, were like flood-water. Fractured, noisy, overwhelming in their weight and their consequences. 

Today, though, Red felt as if his thoughts were resolved into something. Neither whole nor coherent. Not capable of being rendered into speech.

But they were coloured by a certain composure. An insight.

He signed to Green: _You had to go to the Sevii Islands. I had to come here._

Green’s gaze, always a lighter colour than his, was honey-brown in the sunlight. He shaded them with his hand.

Red knew he blamed himself. Even if Green hadn’t admitted it to him directly. It’d been in what he said in the cave, in the way he acted around Red. I was a reason you came up here _,_ Green’s posture said.

Red had brought him up here because he was angry. He hadn’t brought him, he understood now, to punish him. To punish either of them.

 _When I first came here_ , he signed, carefully, _there were pretty things._ Peaceful things. Places and Pokemon that were traces upon the pattern of a greater universe. In that universe, Red didn't matter. Red’s inadequacies, and his weaknesses, and his inability to cope with anyone, including himself – they were insignificant. In timelessness, they disappeared. In timelessness, Red could remember other timeless things.

Of course, near the end, the universe had faded. Into Red’s loneliness, and misery, and invisibility.

That didn't change that, like Green with Pidgeot, and the joy he’d felt when he caught him, there were moments that Red could look back upon with only happiness.

Red shaped his fingers into words. _I wanted you to see them. That’s why we’re here._

His friend followed the movements of his hands. At the end, he gave a slow, steady blink before he looked away toward the horizon.

Above them, Charizard flew lazy, almost-circles in a sun-washed sky.

They spent a few more days atop Mount Silver. Green thought briefly about his Gym, then decided that his trainers were used to him being gone for periods of time anyway, and said nothing when Red grabbed his hand and dragged him off to see yet another cavern.

He thought nothing – or tried not to – about that new development either. Red’s new willingness to hold his hand. To grab his forearm, or lean against his shoulder. It was a level of comfort with him that Red hadn’t demonstrated for a long time.

So Green wasn’t going to jeopardise it by doing anything as unnecessary as talking about it.

He concentrated on the fact that he was catching a whole lot of new Pokemon instead. He didn’t bother with Zubat and Golbat. But he caught a rare Crobat. He caught a Rhyhorn, which made him nostalgic for Rhyperior, traded away and probably joyfully racing around in Kalos. Then there was a Clefairy, one that would make Daisy’s Clefable happy. A Chansey. A couple of Illumise and Volbeat. And, out of a vague sense of duty because his Gym was supposed to be a Rock-type Gym – and was now, to Lance’s unspoken frustration, an anything-goes Gym – a couple of Geodude and an Onix. There were Magikarp in the lakes too. Endless Magikarp. And even a few Chinchou and Lanturn in the deeper waters.

Green had filled his Pokedex a long time ago. But here were Pokemon who’d migrated here from other regions. Pokemon he’d never seen before, because even when he travelled it was usually around Kanto itself, or at most to Johto.

It made him think, suddenly and inexplicably, of Mom. She’d been from Kalos, after all. And she and his father had journeyed so often, and so widely, that many of their Pokemon hadn’t been ones that lived in Kanto. They’d been to Hoenn, to Sinnoh, to Unova and Alola. They’d been to Galar, and regions further even than that.

Mom’s favourite partner, Honedge, was a Kalosian Pokemon. He’d been sent to Green’s aunt in Hoenn after his trainer’s death. A Steel and Ghost-type. His favourite pastime, when Green was a child, had been to disappear and appear at random moments. Gramps would be terrified; Mom and Daisy would laugh. Dad would pour Gramps a beer, and Green would beg for chocolate milk as if the two things were related.

Dad’s best friend hadn’t been a Pokemon from Kanto. Dad hadn’t caught that many of his own Pokemon at all. He’d never been interested in being a trainer. But he’d had an Archen. One of Gramps’s research buddies in Unova had resurrected it from a Fossil, and given it to him as a birthday present.

Gramps had complained endlessly about what a waste of a research opportunity that gift’d turned out to be. Because Dad didn’t bother training Archen, and the Pokemon never evolved into Archeops. 

Archen lived in the lab now. Green had been planning to introduce her to his newly-revived Aerodactyl, after this whole trip with Red.

The reminder made Green reach for Aerodactyl’s Pokeball. She was one of his new Pokemon whom Red hadn’t met yet.

Aerodactyl edged along the eastern cliff-side, spread grey, membranous wings, and stared unblinkingly at Red.

Red stared back.

Green rolled his eyes.

And then his childhood friend turned to him. Signed: _She wants to fly._

“Well,” Green said. “We are on top of the highest peak in the spine of two regions.”

He wasn’t ashamed, he told himself, that after five minutes Red could read his Pokemon quicker and more accurately than Green himself could.

He climbed up onto Aerodactyl’s ridged back. Red scrambled up onto Charizard.

As their Pokemon set off from the peak, strong wings gliding effortlessly on the high winds, Green looked back at Red just once.

The place they chose to land, after about half an hour, was within sight of the Indigo Plateau. Lower than both the Plateau and Mount Silver, it was rough and barren, whipped by years of wind and rain to form a slab that jutted outward into the sky. When Aerodactyl touched her claws to the rock, and Green got off, only the snapping of her jaws around his shirt collar prevented him from sliding downward the dozen or so feet of descending cliff-face into a sheet of thin-looking ice.

Red got down more carefully, gesturing Charizard back into the air so that they would have more space.

Green’s fingers hurt with the force necessary to drag himself into a steadier position on the rock. His neck hurt too, from the force of Aerodactyl’s jaw-grip.

Red looked a question at him.

Green’s chest was tight. “I’m fine,” he said.

His friend studied him.

“I guess you didn’t fly out here all that often.” Green said, turning to take in the mountains surrounding them, the clean, crisp air. The wind pierced through his jacket. His fingers, even gloved, were miserably cold. “You’d have run into Lance if you had. I swear he and his Dragonite are one of the reasons the League is on a plateau.”

Red rested a hand on Aerodactyl’s snout.

The barren slab of rock they stood upon jutted out into the sky. Charizard was a shadow flying across a sea of clouds. Mount Silver rose in to the east, a high, snow-laden peak that was far more vivid than the spectre that’d loomed at the edges of Green’s life for years.

Below them stretched a vista of other peaks, shallow and deeper valleys, forest thick and dense with the spring season. Somewhere in there, Green thought, hazily, distantly, Red’s Espeon had probably carved out a new life for himself.

Espeon took a long time to evolve. Most trainers didn’t have the patience. Eevee didn’t make for the most battle-ready Pokemon, after all. The moves they learned tended to deal them just as much damage as their opponents. Their defensive skills and health were weak, and a good hit from just about any larger, more powerful Pokemon would knock one out as easy as anything. In the beginning, when Green had just caught his own Eevee, he’d only been able to level her up by usng her first in a battle, and then withdrawing her in favour of a different Pokemon. Getting experience that way, by tagging onto Green’s other Pokemon – it was something Green would never have had the patience to do, before.

Sometimes, when Green thought of his Pokemon journey, and the three years that came after, it all seemed an inky blot in the landscape of his memory.

But Red had had things that made him happy. The things he’d brought Green up Mount Silver to see. To experience, too.

Red was waiting. Still, patient. The nine-year-old who’d sat with Green a little less than a year after Mom and Dad failed to come home. The eleven-year-old who’d faced off with him across the length and breadth of the Champion’s Room. The fourteen-year-old who’d come back, and brought Green’s Charizard with him, as strong and healthy as could be expected of any Pokemon trained on top of a mountain for three years.

His dark gaze had flickered to Green’s collar.

Not his collar. The pendant around his neck. After a moment, Green realised that it was probably because he’d started gripping it tightly enough to bruise.

The pendant. Dad’s pendant, made from one Green and one Yellow Shard, a gift from Mom for their anniversary soon after Daisy had been born.

Mom and Dad had loved each other. They had loved Green.

Daisy loved him too.

Gramps cared in his own way.

Red was his friend.

These things were outside of time. They were locked. They were fixed points in history.

These fixed points – they weren’t promises that could be broken. They weren’t prophecies for the future. But, in some way, they were a place to return to.

Daisy had said, that time they were cleaning out the attic, and she found her Alolan Beach Glass: _I’ve been looking into how to make jewellery. Mom didn’t make Dad’s pendant, that one you’ve got now. But I’d like to make something some day._ She hadn’t looked at him, busying herself with running a soft, clean cloth over the piece of Beach Glass instead. _Maybe I’ll even make something for you and Gramps. Would you like that?_

 _Yeah,_ he’d said, when he could trust himself to speak. _Sure, I’d like that. Use Relic Silver or something expensive, and I’ll definitely like it._

She’d laughed at him.

Now, Green controlled his own expression. Let go of the pendant, and reached out to take Red’s hand.

Seven months after his childhood friend had dragged himself to Viridian Gym, that hand was no longer as skinny as it’d been. As chapped and torn by cold, and sharp rocks, and hard living.

It was as solid as his own hand. Even if Green’s fingers were longer and thinner, and his nails less neat. It was healthy, and the pulse in the wrist beat with a steady, vivid life.

“It’s nice up here,” Green said. “I mean, it’s freaking cold. And my head hurts from how thin the air is. And my legs ache from all the hiking. But other than that, like I said, we can visit. As often as you want.”

Red didn’t take his hand away. But he turned it palm-down, fingers pointing to the right, and brought down the blade edge of his open right hand onto the back. A simple motion. Green had seen it a hundred times before.

“Thank you,” Green said. He didn’t know if he was echoing Red or saying it himself. “You took your time about it, but you came back.”

On the way home from Mount Silver to Pallet Town, Red sat atop Charizard. He watched the dense forests give way to open fields, and then to the thinner, more sunlit wood between Viridian and his hometown.

As he did, thoughts flitted across his mind.

Mewtwo, emerging from the Master Ball into the silent, snowy quiet of Mount Silver’s peak, despair in its shaking, bone-thin limbs.

Espeon, backing away from him with incomprehension in diamond-bright eyes and sleek ears pressed against a silver head.

The lake deep in the cavern below the peak, and how Pikachu had dogged his trainer’s nightly trips down there in the final few months before Ethan’s arrival.

The day when he had taken his Pokemon, and hiked down the mountain before walking the route that would take him past Victory Road, and straight to Viridian City.

Green had been waiting for him at the door to his Gym. Eevee on his shoulder, a world Red didn’t understand in his eyes.

But he had been waiting for him anyway.

Just like, in Pallet Town, in the red-roofed house where Red had grown up without either his father or – reliably – his voice, his mother was waiting for him to come home.

As he absorbed the sunlight warm on his skin, and the wind crisp in the folds of his jacket, and Pikachu’s tail whipping his face as the Pokemon scrambled upright to point out the rows of houses in the distance, he let that knowledge settle into him.

“Ten minutes,” Green called from Pidgeot’s back. “And then we’re home.”

Spring shaded into summer. Green in turns liked and hated summer. On the one hand, it was warm. On the other hand, school let out for the summer. And while kids on their final-year primary school trip usually went to Professor Oak’s lab or some other research facility to get their kicks, kids in middle and high school sometimes decided their city’s Gym was a better destination. Well, Green agreed. But he didn’t have to like it.

“Hey,” he shouted at a scrawny kid who had to be younger than him, wearing the Viridian Middle School uniform, “Get _off_ the battle floor. Back to the statues, go on.”

The scrawny kid took her foot off a neon-lit moving tile. Scampered back to her group of giggling friends.

Green gritted his teeth. Caught Ida’s gaze.

Having been put in charge of today’s group of children by lot, Ida made a face back at him. Then plastered on a smile, and turned to the kids’ teacher. “Maybe a look at the Pokemon out back would be a good idea now? There’s a challenger on the floor today, so it’s better not to stay in the main hall longer than necessary.”

“Of course,” said the young man who was the teacher. “Come, children.”

Elan, holding the fort beneath the dais by himself while Ida led the school tour, tossed Azumarill’s Great Ball between his hands. “Is that the last one this week?”

Green sat at the edge of the dais. The challenger in the hall was battling Arabella on a half-size arena right now. He had time. “No, there’s Celadon High School today, and the Pokemon Technical Institute on Friday morning.”

“The one outside of Vermillion?” Elan said. “They’re a snooty bunch.”

Before Green could respond, the doors to the main hall opened.

The trainer who stood in the doorway, red-and-white ribbon in her hair, looked familiar.

Green frowned, and then waved. “May. Didn’t I give you a badge months ago?”

The clump of middle-school children turned their heads as one to stare at her.

Elan muttered: “You’d think they’d never gone on their first journey.”

Green ignored him. “Why’re you back?”

May bowed, politely. “I have a message from Professor Oak. If you’ve got a moment, Gym Leader Green.”

At that moment, the challenger battling Arabella let out a cry as his Electabuzz collapsed to the ground.

“Well, looks like I’ve got a moment now,” Green said, after gesturing Elan over to help Arabella comfort the crying trainer. “Elan will call me if it looks like someone will make it to the dais.”

They went to the vending machine by the front doors. A can of ice-cold coffee and an orange soda clinked one after the other into metal slot. May’s Raichu got herself out of the white-and-red Pokeball on her trainer’s belt, and wrangled a green tea.

Afterward, they sat on the lip of the fountain with their drinks in hand (or paw), and watched children run laughing and shouting on the city street. Drunk on summer vacation and high off the promise of the weekend Tanabata Festival.

Green kicked his coffee back at the thought of this afternoon’s high-school students.

He would make it, he consoled himself. Jut a few days more, and he was on a two-week vacation. He’d already informed Ethan, who’d probably informed Lance. Lance, who was somehow still kind-of, vaguely, informally in charge of the League despite the second new Champion in four years.

 _After some discussion,_ Gramps had coughed, when Green brought it up the last time he went back to check on Tauros and his other Pokemon. _It was decided that eleven is too young to be solely and fully responsible for all Pokemon-related matters in Kanto and Johto._

Also after some discussion, Green learned, mostly because _Red_ had decided that he still wanted to make the occasional trip to Mount Silver, it’d been established that challengers who went up against Ethan would continue to be sent on to Red. For the experience.

 _The soul-destroying experience?_ Green had said, as his friend communed silently with Tauros over the fence.

 _Green,_ his grandfather sighed. _Please take this seriously._

Everything had changed, and somehow nothing had changed at all.

It was a strange feeling.

Sat on the fountain with her soda can balanced on one knee, May watched her Raichu set an empty can of green tea on the ground and hop up onto the fountain edge.

A spiky yellow tail hovered over the water. Then dipped in. And lifted out.

Then dipped in. And lifted out.

Then dipped in. And lifted out.

Then –

Green’s temper snapped. Pointy-eared rats were apparently the same level of annoying everywhere. “What message do you have from Gramps?”

May’s drink paused half-way to her mouth. She said: “Oh. The professor asked me to tell you that three new trainers will be setting out from Pallet Town in September. Chase, Elaine, and Trace. They were a few years younger than you at school.”

The names didn’t ring a bell. But then, the primary school at Pallet was small, and there weren’t always ten-year-olds setting off on Pokemon journeys. Especially in the past couple of years; people usually moved out to the big cities when they finished their Pokemon journeys and got their first jobs or continued their education. Most of them didn’t come back.

If there were kids setting off from Pallet Town, Green supposed he owed them some advice, or whatever. “I’ll be in Pewter for a seminar in September,” he said. “But I can meet them while I’m there.”

She blinked at him. Then shrugged. “Well, that’s what he wanted.”

He stared at her.

He’d been going to do it whether or not Gramps wanted him to, but – Gramps had wanted him to? His grandfather.

But, why not? Green was a Gym Leader now. He had a track record with children.

As he tried to shove the two puzzle pieces together into a configuration that worked, May’s Raichu bent her nose low to the fountain water.

Her weight shifted, long feet sliding slowly forward.

May’s back was to the Pokemon. Her head was tilted at Green. “Um, so that’s the message. Are you okay?” 

Raichu wobbled once. Then twice.

Maybe it was reflexes. Green’s feet moved before his brain did.

May caught his arm. 

And somehow, between the three of them, they all ended up in the fountain.

Soaking wet, and hair standing on end.

At least the children on the other side of the street were entertained.

“You can tell my Gramps it’s fine,” Green said, nearly fifteen minutes later, dripping water onto the tiled floor of the Gym’s ground-floor public bathroom. At least his PokeGear and PokeDex were fine; he’d checked. “I’ll just give the kids a lecture and some Great Balls to get them started.”

May was wringing out her hair with a towel.

Salma and Elan were laughing themselves sick by the door.

Green crossed the floor, grabbed the fresh stack of towels from the latter, and slammed the door shut.

And then he dropped one of the dry towels onto Raichu’s brown, bifurcated ears. And cleared his throat. “Since you’re here, and everything. I heard that you challenged the Elite Four.”

A quick flick of grey eyes to his face.

“I’ll have you know, I don’t give out eighth badges that easily.”

Raichu’s paw went up, pulled the towel off.

“Look,” Green said, quickly, “I’m not telling you off for losing. Karen’s Umbreon is an intimidating little shit. Just, why haven’t you gone back?”

“Does it matter?”

“Well, it’s none of my business, really.”

Chipped. “It’s not.”

What could he say? That there was something, maybe in her face, or her stance. The over-grown mouse sitting in the bathroom with them.

“I’m not a coward,” May said. “Battling – it just isn’t for me.”

“Okay,” Green said. Because the over-grown mouse’s tail was lashing. And Green, who suddenly wanted to do nothing more than call Daisy and make sure Red hadn’t gone off somewhere without a clear return date, wasn’t qualified to counsel anyone.

He nudged the wet towels on the ground into a pile with his foot.

“I’m going to let the morons out there back in.”

May said: “What if I want it to be?”

“What?”

Her shoulders were tight. “What if I want battling to be for me? Even if I’m not good at it. Even if I can’t be the best.”

 _How do you know you can’t?_ his fourth-grade teacher would have said.

 _It doesn’t matter_. That would be Daisy’s take.

 _Then don’t do it._ Eleven-year-old Green, the hypocrite.

He said: “Then battle for a different reason than winning.”

“What reason could there be to battle except to win?”

Green couldn’t make her look at him. But then again, it was hard enough looking at himself. The long, cracked mirror along the side of the bathroom. So, he said, as he stuck his hands under the tap for no other reason than habit – he certainly didn’t need to be wetter than he already was – “Think about it. Whatever you decide, don’t be a stranger.” The tap squeaked as it shut. “Now, I should really get back out there.”

Afterward, high schoolers still in Ida’s capable hands, and challengers still far away from the dais, Green stood on the steps that descended from the pillars to the fountain, and watched May and her Raichu make their way down the street towards the Pokemon Centre.

A flap of broad wings and a gust of wind through his hair made him look up.

He shaded his eyes. “You’re early.”

Pikachu leapt off of Charizard’s back and started off in the direction of the large, bobbing lightning-shaped tail.

“You can say hello another time, rat,” Green said. “They’ve got places to be.”

Charizard’s Pokeball settled back on a slim, dark belt.

Red stepped up next to him.

Next week, it would be Red’s fifteenth birthday, his first at home since he was eleven years old. Five days after that, and the birthday decorations would be cleared away from both their homes, and replaced with lanterns hung in front of the house.

Green and Daisy would make offerings to their dead parents at their grave in the hills above Pallet Town, the way Green had once refused to do. Red and his mom would do the same for his grandparents.

On the third and final day, there would be a gathering in the town centre to watch the Bon dance, and then the villagers would move, all of them, in a candlelight procession from the town itself to its outskirts. They’d stop at the little harbour where Red and Green had fished and chased each other around as children, and where kind fishermen still dished out sweets to kids who could guess whether the Pokeball in their hand held a Magikarp or a Goldeen.

At the edge of that harbour, shining lanterns would be set afloat on the dark sea.

Beacons, to guide the souls of their family somewhere far away. A place where they might meet again some day.

“Hey,” Green said, slinging an arm around his childhood friend. “Daisy told me what your birthday present’s going to be. Want a hint?”

Pikachu scampered along at their feet.

Red swiped a Pokeball off Green’s belt, and tossed it at the ground.

As soon as Eevee appeared in a flash of red light, she aimed a paw at Pikachu’s flank.

Green said: “Well, if you’re going to steal my Pokeballs, maybe we should have a battle instead.”

Red’s hands flicked in the shadow of the pillars.

Green could feel the smile on his face. Warm, a little rusty.

He let go of Red, and hooked both arms behind his head. The Viridian sky was a brilliant, summer blue.


End file.
